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Anthony Akinbola presents durag paintings in new Dubai show: a cultural symbol on canvas

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Anthony Akinbola presents durag paintings in new Dubai show: a cultural symbol on canvas

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To define the durag as a piece of cloth used for styling and maintaining hair would be correct, but incomplete. Yes, it is a type of headwear predominantly used to protect and style waves on black hair, but it is also, in the US specifically, a celebrated and complex cultural symbol wielded in music, fashion and even art.

For artist Anthony Akinbola, it is material. His series titled Camouflage is made up of durags, composed in various tints and shades. The cloths are stitched together, stretched, stapled on canvas, with some inside out and others loosely rippling.

"I like that I'm able to frame these works in the conversation of painting," Akinbola says. "There's a subversion of power that I'm interested in. By positioning these as paintings, I'm able to upset the conversation around painting, which in the past has been elitist."

Akinbola, who is from Missouri and was born to Nigerian parents, is presenting his first solo exhibition at Carbon 12 in Dubai, where a number of his durag paintings are on view for the show Thanks A Million, which runs until November.

Working in the tradition of readymades, the artist builds his practice on found objects and what he calls "unpacking the material". He often begins with scavenging for items that have histories he can excavate. "I was always interested in being able to re-contextualise objects," he says. "I would pick an object and do research on it. I would find its origin and see how I can manipulate the material, critique its origin or something it's associated with."

The story of the durag's invention is not entirely clear. It may have its roots in headwear used by African slaves in the 19th century to keep their hair in place as they laboured. From the 1930s to the 1960s, black men and women were fashioning types of head coverings from handkerchiefs, scarves or women's stockings. The durag in the cut and shape that we know it today - with strings to tie it in place and a cape at the back - came about in the late 1970s.

In Akinbola's works, the original object does not maintain its hooded shape, but its textures of shiny silk and lush velvet stand out, as do the colours and how the artist harmonises them.

The work Camouflage #055 (Jude), for example, presents varying brown tones - patches of shiny copper, amber and cocoa, skin-like and sensual. Camouflage #053 (Neptune) is also alluring, its alternating pockets of blue shifting from light to dark across the canvas.

Though these have not been included in the show, Akinbola has also made all-black durag works that are among the most striking in his series, not only for the size - with one measuring about six metres across - but also because monochrome brings the textures and shapes into focus. The artist has constructed something else out of the durags: a matte, vast, agape portal.

It's all part of the artist's intention, for the paintings to sit on the edge of the recognisable and the accessible as the everyday object, now transformed, opening up a way to discuss colour, composition and light.

His process isn't always the same. Sometimes he methodically lays out the cloths and stitches them together. Other times, his approach is spontaneous, "more about feeling", stapling durags directly on to wooden panels, building and rearranging as he goes.

With the ascendance of hip-hop and rap in the 1990s to 2000s, the durag gained even more visibility outside of black culture. Rappers such as Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Nelly and Cam'ron all sported it. Akinbola suggests that this popularity may have been limited to pop stars. "It has become more acceptable as it relates to fashion and hip-hop, but the durag, with its proximity to blackness, was also used to vilify its wearers," he says. Individuals donning it, he says, were labelled "hyper-aggressive and hyper-masculine" and "associated with criminality".

Anthony Akinbola, American artist

For the object to transcend these associations and instead become a material in art, for it to exist outside of shops and instead hang in galleries, is the subversion Akinbola seeks.

Over the years, the headwear has been brandished as a sign of cultural pride, a way to present a kind of identity. In 2018, Solange Knowles wore one to the Met Gala. Themed Catholicism that year, Knowles braided her hair in a halo that emerged from a black durag with the cape flowing down the back. Superstar Rihanna has worn different styles, including a crystal-studded one and a plain black one for the cover Vogue magazine. In art, the durag has yet to appear as much.

The measure of how subversive his work is, then, relies in how the viewer understands the durag and its cultural significance, how it has been used to signify different meanings inside and outside of black communities, and whether it is the right object to use, considering its varied reputation.

Embedded in the artist's work is also a critique of the commodification of black culture and the globalised nature of modern-day production, with the artist exposing the "Made in China" tags for some of the durags. This rise in marketability has also allowed the artist to have more choices in his material. "There's more consideration for black consumers. It used to be just black, white, maybe red and blue, but now there's a range. In polyester and fine silk, too," Akinbola says.

The durag, like other parts of black culture, including vernacular, music, style and fashion, has also been appropriated, according to the artist. "There is a fetish to the object. There's an idea of achieving that status or style. The object has utility and has a certain purpose, but it is also able to be co-opted in that way," he says.

The artist steps outside of that to give the object a beauty it did not always have. By detaching the durag from the wearer, the artist gives viewers a chance to rethink our presumptions about this piece of cloth and the head it sits on. He also brings the intimacy of the everyday, entangled in personal items that are overlooked, to the public space, directing us to see in new ways.
Thanks A Million is on view at Carbon 12 in Dubai until Thursday, November 4. More information is at carbon12.art

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Anthony Akinbola presents durag paintings in new Dubai show: a cultural symbol on canvas

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To define the durag as a piece of cloth used for styling and maintaining hair would be correct, but incomplete. Yes, it is a type of headwear predominantly used to protect and style waves on black hair, but it is also, in the US specifically, a celebrated and complex cultural symbol wielded in music, fashion and even art.

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Artist Zadie Xa on Art Night festival, sea animals and highlighting minority stories by Ben Luke for Evening Standard UK

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ZADIE XA MIXES ANCIENT KOREAN SHAMANISM AND CONTEMPORARY ECOLOGICAL CONCERNS IN HER ART

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ZADIE XA MIXES ANCIENT KOREAN SHAMANISM AND CONTEMPORARY ECOLOGICAL CONCERNS IN HER ART

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When Vancouver-born artist Zadie Xa and I speak, she's working at her studio on an industrial estate in London. Due to connection issues, we switch from video to an audio call, meaning I don't get to tour her space. At various points, however, I hear Xa's dog gently barking, as well as the sounds of seagulls -and teenage boys harassing said birds- on a nearby roof. A soundtrack of ambient animal and human interactions feels fitting for a call with the rising artist, who often incorporates nature-inspired motifs into her fantastical paintings, textile, installation, video, sound, and performance works.

Zadie Xa: House Gods, Animal Guides and Five Ways 2 Forgiveness, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 20 September 2022-30 April 2023. Photo by Andy Keate.

Coastal creatures and communities are major through lines in Xa's multimedia art. They're also references linking her childhood home in the Pacific Northwest to ancestors in South Korea. For Xa, researching marine life, including the colonial histories of Pacific North America and coastal Korea, is a vitalizing framework for learning about social, cultural, and political histories. These interests are partly informed by her heritage;Xa's parents immigrated to Western Canada from South Korea and she incorporates aspects of Korean shamanism and animist traditions into her work. When we speak, she discusses a particular fascination with orcas: "I began thinking about orcas around 2018 or 2019 for a whole host of reasons." In part she was "homesick" for Vancouver, but she was also intrigued by the whales' complex presence in both Indigenous art histories and Canadian nation-building projects. This interdisciplinary research informed Grandmother Mago, a highly praised performance at the Venice Biennial in 2019 that featured dancers and drummers sporting sci-fi-meets-aquatic costumes and moving in a choreographed procession.

This past September, Xa continued exploring affinities between ancestral knowledge and contemporary life in "House Gods, Animal Guides and Five Ways 2 Forgiveness", her largest solo exhibition to date at London's Whitechapel Gallery. Though she's still fine-tuning production details when we chat, Xa has decided that "a hanok, which is a traditional Korean domestic structure," will anchor the installation. She plans to wrap the hanok's wooden frame with colourful, hand-dyed linen that references jogakbo, a traditional Korean technique for making cloth out of fabric scraps. Xa will also present new paintings and textile works within and around the hanok, creating an immersive context that reflects her interests in anti-colonial politics, built and so-called "natural" ecologies, and matrilineal mythologies.

References to ancient pasts and dynamic futures tend to stack and fuse in Xa's work, reflecting the artist's expansive perspective. "Rather than create an entirely new world, I like to incorporate the ideas I've previously worked with into my new work," she shares, continuing, "I'm someone who needs to conceive of an entire framework for an exhibition and the topics it will explore before I can get into the details and start creating objects or planning a performance." For "House Gods", Xa says she's trying to "work more consciously from a place of intuition." I note this must be challenging given the vast scope of her projects and their execution, which can range from painting murals, to designing masks and costumes, to working with choreographers and sound artists. Xa laughs, "Sometimes I'm envious of artists who can begin by thinking about form and materials. It takes me a long time to conceive of a full idea and, even then, with performance, you can't fully know what it will mean until it's presented to a live audience."

Zadie Xa: House Gods, Animal Guides and Five Ways 2 Forgiveness, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 20 September 2022-30 April 2023. Photo by Andy Keate.

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Zadie Xa Mixes Ancient Korean Shamanism and Contemporary Ecological Concerns in Her Art - S/ magazine

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When Vancouver-born artist Zadie Xa and I speak, she's working at her studio on an industrial estate in London. Due to connection issues, we switch from video to an audio call, meaning I don't get to tour her space. At various points, however, I hear Xa's dog gently barking, as well as the sounds of ...

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For the latest instalment in my ongoing series of interviews I spoke to artist Zadie Xa. Born in Vancouver, Canada and currently living in London, Zadie has exhibited both in the UK and internationally working with performance, video, painting and textiles, exploring how different cultures inform identities and notions of self. Zadie's intricate, hand sewn garments bring together a range of personal imagery sourced from music, digital space, fashion, and art history. Zadie has developed a system of semiotics and a personal visual language for articulating nuanced Asian identity narratives, which are frequently situated within fantastical or supernatural realms. Zadie has most recently exhibited at the Arnolfini in Bristol, Art Night 2019, Yarat Contemporary in Azerbaijan and Tramway in Glasgow. Zadie will be showing at De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill in 2020.
I listened to the podcast GUEST, GHOST, HOST: MACHINE! with Victoria Sin and Legacy Russel who talk about fabulation and story-telling within performance, this idea of creating narratives where we purposely place ourselves at the centre of our own experiences, where science fiction and fantasy tend to give us the tools to create an imagined but a better future. Can I ask you how you came to work in this way?
I had originally trained as a painter but ended up finding it a very frustrating medium to work with. I wasn't able to express my ideas and found it very restrictive. I was taught through a Eurocentric and Western-weighted way of making images. I would blame my frustrations specifically on that. I was institutionalised. I never really felt like I had my own ideas. Everyone always told me that my ideas were too complex to speak about within the medium of painting.

I tried to think about ways in which the figure or a person or a character could be central within my work and, in some way, without realising, I put myself at the centre of that narrative. When I came to making textile garments, which in the beginning and in many ways still function as two-dimensional and then later three-dimensional paintings, I found they lent themselves to be put onto the body. I guess when working with performers or working with an actor, this creates a platform for a figure or a character to be central. It's also about the accouterments that surround me within my work where I'm able to build the narrative.

I think in the beginning, for the first couple of years, I did put myself in the centre as I had this desire to connect to my homeland. I feel, more and more, that I'm pulling away from doing that now as I'm actively pushing against the ways in which women, people of colour and queer artists need to present themselves as artists. I think in the beginning when I was making work it made sense that I would be at the centre of my work. For me, acting in that way is, in itself, a performance that allows myself and my body to be cannibalized, which is essentially what I want my work to be against. This is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about.

A while back, and this is another reason why I use masks in my work, I found that I wasn't really interested in representing feminine faces or canons of beauty. I understand that my face looks a certain way and I don't want that to be at the centre of the work. My interest in female archetypes are powerful women and women-identifying people. For me personally, it has nothing to do with sexual desire. If there is sexuality attached to it, it's more the idea of birthing life or being an aggressive mother or a protector or a grower and actually, it doesn't really have to do with sexual desire in that way. That sexual nature, for me, has more to do with power. This probably comes from feeling very insecure as a young person or as a young woman growing up within patriarchal landscapes.

As I was saying, I have always placed myself at the centre of my work because, and similar to many other artists, we want to see ourselves at the centre of our own experiences. We didn't have that type of representation when we were young. I don't necessarily have to be in the centre, but I still view a lot of the characters as individuals that I relate to and who I look up to. These are essentially my alter egos. Right now for me, an alter ego figure is an elderly woman, an elderly, rural woman that's strong enough to work the ground. This is an experience that I've not had but I can relate to. Especially the way people in my family have had to work really hard because they were immigrants or because of the situations they found themselves in Korea and after. I think that's something that I've always been really interested in.

I have a very female-led family. I only have a relationship with my mother's side who are five sisters out of seven siblings. I think strong women have always been very present in my life. My practice now looks at women whom I aspire to be like as opposed to just having it all about me. Well, having said that, I completely understand the work still stems from that and in many ways it's a conflict that I carry. I feel that a lot of my work is very self-serving and narcissistic in ways that probably all artists make work.

I'm interested in storytelling but find that I'm not a very academic person. I'm very envious of colleagues or friends or other artists who use texts as their medium. While I do that too, the texts tend to come naturally to me. I don't have a problem talking or speaking about my ideas, sometimes sentences are disjointed and not structured overly well but I am able to hold a conversation. I think that the voice is something that I very much enjoy exploring. I guess most people, even those who may not feel comfortable writing, can write in first-person like in a diary or a journal. I think that those are the kinds of voices that I myself am attracted to, specifically within the context of oral storytelling within history and pushing against the idea that writing is inherently patriarchal. I am obviously influenced from Korean culture and Confucianism and these patriarchal cultures that push against God-based indigenous cultures and religions that were less scholarly focused and more intuitive.
Has there been a process of 'unlearning' from these patriarchal teachings?
Yes, definitely. From an art-making perspective I harbour a lot of these anxieties and hang-ups that younger people or younger artists don't necessarily have. I think it has a lot to do with Canadian art-making within Western art history. There's a lot of baggage in terms of what you should know when theorising art. That's the background I came from. I went to school in Vancouver where you are constantly reminded of the legacy of that school. They pride themselves on having a history of photo conceptualism, which was a movement very rooted in the success of white men; Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, Ron Terada. They're fantastic artists but they're all men. Canadian culture is based on this history. It's sad as one tries to participate in that when you're young, especially if you're from Vancouver. In many ways this is a result of Vancouver being quite cut-off geographically from other art centres. It's different now because it acknowledges art from Asia, comparatively to other European cities or New York where you're closer to the UK or Toronto or Montreal. That's what I grew up within. These are your hometown heroes that are forced upon you and on top of that, they're not even regional. They're not international. There's this expectation that if you are to succeed and you're from Vancouver, your practice should resemble that history and the work of those male artists.

I then went on to study at the Royal College of Art where the climate was very similar. I think it's starting to change now but it was very intense. It was quite shocking. It was a much smaller group of students back when I was studying. I remember a colleague of mine who was from Israel and identified as gay. Unfortunately, that was seen as a crazy identity position to be in because of this incredibly white and hetero-normative system. I remember him saying that the place was so devoid of any socio-political conversations, regardless if it's in your work. He said it literally feels like 1960s America with Willem de Kooning and Clement Greenberg. That's really what the vibe was when I was there. I believe it's very different now.

I mention all this because if you're in that position, within a strange hierarchical system, it's either A, not interesting to you or B, you just aren't able to keep up with it, not because you're stupid but because it's genuinely not the way you make work. You need to unlearn that, but before you realise that, you're wasting a lot of years thinking you're not worthy of making work, or it doesn't live up to these standards that people have laid out before you.
Having followed your practice for a while it seems very much part of who you are, way beyond any educational system.
That's right and I think for a long time that's the way I felt. I feel differently now. There's a lot of reasons why but I feel very lucky right now. I don't even want to say I've caught the wave but i'm making the work I've been wanting to make since I was a young person. I guess the art world has caught up to that, which is great but then in lies a danger when it's mixed with market capitalism and cultural institutional cachet, it just becomes very muddled.

Even I sometimes feel confused by things. I imagine for younger artists who are interested in making work like this it becomes the same kind of toxic system, where one should make work that looks like this and talks about this, if you want to be successful right after university. This is the same narrative that's been going on forever. When I graduated from school no one was told that you must do your masters because like I said, all these other blokey superstars never did their masters as that wasn't a thing in the '90s or whenever they graduated. In Canada, the idea was that you would wait two years minimum and then you would apply for your masters. I decided to move to Spain. I lived there for four and a half years and then I thought, I'm ready to do my masters now. Not everyone can do that because the courses are very expensive. That's another hurdle I've had to manage in my life.

Sometimes I suffer from impostor syndrome. I think it comes down to that feeling of inadequacy. If I were to put my work up against some kind of hard-edged, hard-lined conceptual painting it would fit a different criteria but that language is just not interesting to me. Not saying it's easy to learn but if you're literate, you can watch documentaries, like Art:21, you can listen to these people talk. I can actually hear a level of resentment in my tone, because it's real, because it really was pushed on me for so many years. Luckily, I don't think it's so much the way now. I can see that change but it was really debilitating for a long time.

It's interesting, I think I've only been interviewed by two cis male curators in the past year. Surprisingly, I don't seem to be very interesting to other men, practitioners or curators. It's really a thing. I actually feel very fortunate at this point. Women and those that self-identify as women, their stories have become more mainstream now. There is a greater number of curators who happen to be women or women-identified who are in positions of power, where they're able to provide a platform for my work. I think, if this was 10 years ago, I would still really be struggling to have a show.

It's all new for me. Only within the past few years have I seen this happen. I am completely and fully supported by other women and women of colour. They are the ones who have supported me exclusively, with the exception of two people. It's a noticeable thing for me. Just to be clear, it's a very specific type of cis man that isn't interested in my work. I have been interviewed by a man. I was very suspicious of the whole set up but he ended up being a really thoughtful person and had clearly done his research. Those are the bare minimum requirements, but sometimes these things will surprise you, which is unfortunate. He clearly found ways in which he could not identify on a personal level but still find my work interesting. Ultimately, I always feel if curiosity and a willingness to listen is strong enough within that person, the subject and artistic practice is interesting to everyone and anyone.
I would like to talk about your exhibition Child of Magohalmi and the Echoes of Creation for Art Night and the fictional, mythical and immersive world you created. Your performance and installation at Walthamstow Library brought multiple aspects of your practice together. How was this experience for you?
It was great. There are probably a few format issues I would change but that's the nature of those types of events. One area I found frustrating, from the perspective of the viewer, people attending the event wanted to see the live performance, but the evening was punctuated by a film screening. I think in a normal gallery setting, a structure like that can work well because then there's no pressure to queue and you can leave whenever you want. However, with Art Night there were scheduled times for the performance, which people had to wait for. I would really like to have an exhibition where you can view both the film and the performance in the same context. Other than that, my experience of the night was great, mainly because I was present in the room.

When thinking about my work, I'm not really able to think about the textiles if I don't think about the sound work. I'm unable to think about the sound work without thinking about the performers I might be working with and then thinking about performers and how they influence my thinking around particular narratives. I can't separate them. Sometimes it's really difficult because I'm asked to talk about my work and I give these very long-winded responses, which I then feel guilty about. It's because of that, I'm not really able to separate the work. Of course, I can compartmentalise and talk directly about the textile works and where they're coming from and how they're supposed to operate but in order to really fully do that and provide a full picture, I need to speak about every other element of my practice because everything is related. I think with Art Night that was probably the first time I was really able to do something like that. I guess the reason is not to have the platform but, to be honest, the money and the high-level of organisation that was involved as well.

I've always been interested in theatre and theatrics, however one thing that's been frustrating for me as an artist with an object making or painting background, there's an expectation to make something and leave it in a room for a month or two months. With performance it's a very intense time based element of my practice. While I do enjoy the performative side, I feel the amount of work that I'm putting into these performances, I'm not getting the right level of artistic feedback, mainly because they're too short. I think it's because everything needs to be condensed very heavily. I want to be able to play with tempo, speed, modes of looking and how a performance should be digested by the audience. I'm someone who likes to be in control, especially when it comes to my work. When you have longer periods, perhaps there's moments where you can let that control go and allow things to happen spontaneously.

Art Night was a very positive experience because I was able to see all those elements come together. I think in the future, and particularly for an exhibition, I would like there to be more of a mix between the film, the performance and the live music. I would like to blend these elements further.
Your textiles and costumes are adorned with traditional Asian symbols, words, imagery, hair and nails. When being in the presence of the costumes they signify the performative act of wearing clothes, or being able to place the clothes on and change your identity and disguise yourself. I want to ask about time; how long do they take to make and is that process a performative act?
Yes, I do see it as performative. When I'm making a painting, which I almost never do now, that for me is a very private as I think painting is quite difficult for me. It's a medium I don't have as much confidence with. With the textile garments, I'm more comfortable with elements of collage. There are moments when I'm working where things are looking a complete mess and I really need to be by myself with that work. In all honesty it makes me feel quite uncomfortable as you are faced with all your mistakes laid out in front of you. That process needs to take place before I can start pairing back and moving things around. For me it's extremely performative. It's always hard because I say these things and as a logical speaking person, it sounds very fanciful and crazy but if we keep in mind the idea of performance and why I'm making these performances, then it makes sense.

I think for most people who work with craft, and in particular traditional craft, you're directly linked to aspects of your past or your family's history. With my work, I'm not interested in romanticising Korean culture. I'm not interested in lifting actual images and then re-purposing them into my work. I'm not interested in remaking existing crafts. I'm interested in thinking about how certain things were made, why they were made and inserting aspects of that into my work, especially from a visual perspective. I've never been very rigid with a particular process. I'm not very technical either. For example, I've used a type of Korean patchwork in my work because it reminded me of an American modernist abstract painting and because I was interested in the idea of collage and throw-away materials. I'm interested in women who would take scraps of fabric, similar to quilting, rural quilting, and make these beautiful textiles. I love thinking about how women would communally sit around and make these textiles together. They would basically loot little pieces of fabric to create these wrapping cloths for important documents or gifts. I guess it's just the idea of quilting and collage that I find so interesting.

Collage is the most important aspect of my work both conceptually and physically. Physically, I'm concentrating on my ability to work with disparate materials, colours and textures. That's probably why I'm so interested in the way hip hop music was made because they're using so many different samples, different instruments to make music. It's cultural overlapping, which for me, conceptually, is very important. For a long time I had a real fixation with hybridised identities because of my own background. I think about how, due to societal lenses, not everyone views themselves as having a hybrid overlapping. For me, that's the way that I work. I pull from different pockets and then conceptually make sense of it all because it's essentially the makeup of how I was raised and how I move through different spaces.

There is this magical quality to my work and my thinking. There is a lot of interest within my practice around the creation of folk tales or ideas of the supernatural. I feel, right now within the zeitgeist, people are very interested in the supernatural or witchcraft. I believe a lot of that has to do with female empowerment and the taking back of control. There is this need to get back to your natural roots. That's not always been the way for me. Without sounding dismissive, as a teenager I would approach these subjects as a real feminist pursuit until I came across Korean Shamanism, something that I had only learned about a few years ago. Korean Shamanism is an indigenous cultural religion that's been systematically suppressed, with many attempts for it to be eradicated. From a social justice perspective and being someone from North America who's from an immigrant family, who has had to contend with the fact that their family has moved to another place where the land has been colonised, it's very complicated. For me, as a non-indigenous Canadian, it's always been very important that I try to learn as much about indigenous history, culture and art as I can.

In Vancouver, imagery of indigenous people is disseminated throughout mainstream media as a way for them to promote their history and make money, basically. That's a very stark contrast to how the government actually deals with indigenous people. For me, when I learned this about the country where my family is from, I felt very strongly about it. I learnt very quickly that I had to push back against Western evangelical Christianity, missionaries and against Japanese colonial rule, as well as outside influences like Confucianism. Silvia Federici discusses this in her book, about how groups of women conjugating together is considered unintelligent and something we should fear. She links this to the idea of hysteria and how most enlightened cultures view historical or primitive religions. This is the same thing for me when I came across Korean Shamanism, which was mostly led by women. I see this is a metaphor. I can imagine myself as a Shaman and how I would navigate throughout the diaspora and be within multiple cultural worlds. That's how I am thinking about it. That's where I develop my views around this idea of the supernatural because within those contexts, within science fiction, anything can happen. I'm always invited to be in talks where they're speaking about new age spirituality. While I think that's interesting, it's not my strength. I literally have a teenager's level of knowledge around astrology. I don't have the wherewithal to be able to speak with any authority on the subject.
I would like to pick up on what you said about navigating through different cultural worlds, the connection to the supernatural and sci-fi. These are topics within your practices that I find fascinating; how bodies that have been historically marginalised thrive in other dimensions.
I honestly believe that's what most queer people or persons of colour think about when making work. Science fiction, this idea of fabulation and fantasy, that's what I'm really interested in. On one hand, it's a great tool, but on the other, I worry about myself. I admire artists that work with storytelling as a way to speak about real life, however, I'm not really able to do that. I need to have a certain distance. In my work I situate myself in a fantastical parallel to reality as a way to process and depict places that are real. I do think, for me anyway, there's a risk of escapism. I'm sure that's what most people are doing when making work like this.
I would like to touch on this idea of distancing yourself from your work. This idea of 'care' is quite a big topic at the moment, how we care for the artists we're working with, especially when commissioning performance or socially engaged works. I spoke to an artist recently who said that she's having to step away from using her own personal experiences as a basis of her performances because she finds it too emotionally draining. Is this something you have considered?
I think if anything I could probably go further and be more personal, not because I'm exposing myself, but because sometimes very personal stories are actually quite universal. I sometimes put a guard up because, in all honesty, it can be a bit boring. I can't sustain a career where I'm just talking about myself all the time. It's boring for me too. It's more interesting to focus and filter those ideas on other characters, which I think, again, in the same way a writer pulls on their own experiences, I'm referencing my own personal perspective. I also don't really enjoy seeing my face in my work all the time, even hearing my voice is difficult. I prefer working with other professional people who are doing a better job than me as they're skilled or trained performers.

I think that's probably one of the reasons I have this real fear of putting myself at the centre of my work, to be seen as a spectacle. This is something that I really struggled with. Even if I am wearing a mask, or my performers are, there's still a female body and a person of colour present. For me, agency and power are very important. I make sure the performers are never put in the position of the entertainer for the night just to be spectated.
I'm keen to understand more about the durational aspects and your relationship with the performers and the audience. How do the performances translate to the audience? What is your relationship with the audience?
Overall I've been lucky. I had one really bad experience, it was a few years ago now. Long story short, it was for a VIP party. I don't think I understood what the event was for. It was sponsored by Becks alcohol and was a night out for bankers in Liverpool. That was the vibe. It was really horrible. I think from that, comparatively to my first experience at the Serpentine, it was very different. With the Serpentine performance we very much controlled the audience and the ways in which they would consume the performance. That's a really important factor for me.

I did another performance on a stage. I really didn't enjoy that experience as there's a real disconnect between the performers and the audience. Whilst, I think the performance part was okay, I just don't think it worked. Of course, it's not always possible to get a good balance like there was in Venice, for example. That performance was completely outside. I think, for me, it's really important that there is that connection between the performer and the audience member. Whether that's friendly, whether there's some call and response effort, which never happens because we're not socially and culturally conditioned to engage in performance art.

The performances that I'm interested in or that stem from my interest are Korean folk performances where the audience is culturally trained to know how to perform and behave. Whether that's a Pansori, which is Korean opera where there's a singular storyteller and a percussionist. There are moments in these stories where the audience knows when they're supposed to chime in. It's almost rehearsed, it's fascinating. This is the same with a lot of Korean folk masked dramas. People know how they're supposed to engage. There's moments within the performance where one of the performers will come around and basically ask for money. Then you and the performer do a little dance. There's also some imprinted and rehearsed lines of spoken dialogue. Of course, that's not going to happen in the art world, but I do like the idea of that setting. The hierarchy within those performances is fascinating and completely non-existent.

These types of performances were enjoyed by the villagers when they were allowed to have a break from the feudal system in Korea. This was a way for them to satirise the different characters within the community through these masks and characterised performances. I guess it's within that relationship, between audience and performer, that I find interesting. If there could be some way to emotionally connect with the audience or the hierarchy could somehow be balanced, that's something I wish to explore.

I do, however, feel the performer should always have the upper hand because they are the ones being watched. For Art Night and Venice I told the performers they needed to be very aggressive in their movements. It's also part of the character, they need to assume that role. The character is supposed to be earthy and really aggressive, creature-like and unsettling. I believe, the audience should always be wondering what's going to happen next. Most of the time people just expect entertainment, which can happen very easily of course if you're using a lot of theatrics, costumes, people, and movement. I'm sure I get it wrong sometimes. I do think about that a lot because I'm responsible for the people that are working with me. I would never want them to feel I wasn't in it with them, or I'm putting them in a space where they're disrespected.
Can I ask you about the pull towards female figures in your life and how they materialise in your work; the goddess Grandmother Mago, the symbol of the orca and your interest in their matrilineal family structures and the female Shaman? Please could talk me through how you came to address some of these themes in your work?
It's how I've been raised. I see the way in which my mother acts or people in my family have been. I've never met my maternal grandmother because she died when my mum was very young. My mum had a very interesting folktale-type upbringing. Growing up one way and then finding herself in another unfortunate position. I think because of this I've been really interested in her past, but also not wanting to poke and pry too much, as well as not use her non-fictional narrative within my work. If you are interested in your own family legacy and you go far back enough, again, I guess it becomes that knowable non-space where you're able to bend the truth in order to understand it further. My way of bringing together elements of my mum's life and talk about my grandmother, I'm able to shape their stories in a way that I'm able to understand and even fill in those gaps and create a new narrative for them.

Although saying that, in a very flat and one dimensional way I do feel it's important to highlight women's stories. For me and for other folks who are queer, those stories need to be told by them. It's not that I putwomen's stories above other non-binary or queer stories, but for me, I do think that's really important. I'm not interested in TERF feminism or that type of female, eccentric stuff. For me I'm actively pushing against male-dominated stories to the point where I'm not even centring them. They don't exist in my world. It's not a conscious dig at them, they genuinely don't exist within my fictional, fantastical sphere. I think it's because men have had such a small presence in my life. The only man that is important in my life is my husband. He came into my life when I was 23. He has a very strong matrilineal family relationship and history. These stories exist in everybody and people feel connected to them, similar to my connection with orcas. I've said this before, and maybe this is redundant, but there are many different eco-species all over the world, but it's the killer whale species that I'm interested in as they are local to where I'm from Vancouver.

I was feeling very homesick and I think a lot of my work has always been about my homeland. It's much more explicit very recently because of my recent trip back to Vancouver. I really wanted to highlight particular stories, obviously in a more idiosyncratic way because Vancouver has a history with white settler colonies and indigenous people. As you can imagine the region has a deep history of amazing and incredible indigenous stories, which I haven't really been interested in. It's very difficult to talk about a place that you're from and you identify as your home but there's many hidden and complex layers. It's not like I'm from Korea either and can speak about a particular village or setting, I don't have that relationship with Korea. However, with the orca, it's a mythological animal, internationally recognised no matter where you go. If you think about it, biologically or through a scientific lens, their social family structures are very interesting. I'm learning that orcas go through menopause, unlike many other animals. The whole idea of a female body after you reproduce, for most animals, you just die because there's no need or point for you to continue living. If you're an animal that lives for a substantial amount of years after your reproduction age, there must be something you can impart that's important to your surrounding community. This is obvious for humans as well as orcas. I also learnt that grandmothers and mothers are the most powerful figureheads in their immediate families. I thought that was incredibly interesting. They're important, not only because they're the leaders that teach or lead the hunts, but they have a responsibility to disseminate the information in which the other orcas need to learn in order to survive. They're also imparting cultural behaviours, which I thought was really fascinating.

There was one orca that was internationally famous because she died at the age of 106, it was at the end of 2016. It was in mainstream media news because it was so phenomenal. Her nickname was granny. She was part of an orca pod that's been studied since the '70s, and because they had been so widely tracked they were somewhat domesticated. Scientists have been able to really observe their family lineage for the past 30 years. To think she had taken care of so many generations of orcas, incredible. Even males within the orca populations never leave their mothers. They will go to another pod to mate, but will leave the female with the calf and go back to their mothers. They have a very strong connection. It's really incredible. There's a parallel with human relationships that I find interesting, the relationships we have with our mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers.

I'm also very interested in how orcas communicate sonically with each other or how whales communicate through sounds, clicks and echolocation. With the Korean goddess Grandmother Mago that I was interested in for Art Night, I read an academic study based upon the origins of female-centric religions and how she came into being, born out of cosmic music. Through my work, I imagine what that cosmic music would sound like. I mean the story is a bit more complicated than that, but in short, through these cosmic melodies, her daughters and grandchildren were reproduced without the need of a male. The sounds that were played kept all the universe in balance. I thought it would be really interesting to parallel that with the way orcas, cetaceans and all aquatic animals are able to communicate and think about how that keeps the core of the earth safe, but also metaphorically, all animals species, if we think about the ocean. Once the ocean starts dying there's an imbalance that's catastrophic for the earth.

I have such a distant relationship with nature now. It was different when I was younger. I do have a real longing to get back to more primal aspects of dependency and coexistence with nature. I find it's probably a lot of internal and existential fear with the current state of the planet. It's always on my mind.
I am interested to ask a bit more about this idea of magic, witchcraft and the supernatural within your work. There is a drive in current artistic practices towards healing and ethnobotany as a result of colonial encounters. Is this something you are interested in?
I know where you're going with that. I feel a lot of conversations within popular culture are very focused on these ideas and types of work at the moment. For me, it's much more about internal cultural healing. This need to feel connected to my family's homeland. Having said that, again, I'm not interested in trying to adapt or assimilate this idea of what an authentic Korean experience is. I'm not trying to replicate actual modes of making within traditional craft and then put that into my practice.

I make a conscious decision to take something and transform it. That's how I understand my personal experience. It's how I've been shaped as a person, which is equally Korean. Again, I am interested in witchcraft but I think that keeps coming up because it's in the zeitgeist, which makes sense because of the way I tend to talk about Korean Shamanism. Shamanism can be paralleled with ideas of Western feminism, Wicca or Pagan practices, it's very similar, but it's important to mention that Shamanism it's rooted in real traditional cultural practices. I remember someone once asked me, within my performances am I recreating Shamanic rituals? I was like, no, I would understand why you would ask that because there are a lot of performances that try to re-enact certain types of rituals but that's not what I'm doing. I do think of my work as ritual, but again, the ritual is based on modes of making and how you present ideas on a public stage. I'm not trying to recreate a religious experience. I believe those things are sacred. I feel on one hand it's very lazy and lacks maturity or depth to try to recreate those things, even if they are done with careful intentions. I honestly don't think you can create that within a performance, and certainly not within the art world.

It's a good question and I understand why you ask it. I guess I'm starting to feel like I need to really set myself away from that. The stigma with Korean Shamans, and probably other cultural practitioners or historical religions are easily associated with witchcraft because it's outside of the main doctrine of Catholicism. It's insulting to them. I'm interested in that too, but I see it as very separate from my work. I'm deeply interested in folk art culture across the board. I guess it's because the way language is inscribed through shapes and symbols, colour or weaving or different types of embroidery on all types of traditional clothing, those are indicators of historical stories that have happened to me as a person. That's what fascinates me. The idea that you are able to assume a role when you wear that garment.
On more of a practical level, could I ask you about your exhibition at Yarat Contemporary in Azerbaijan, Tramway in Glasgow and your forthcoming exhibitions at De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill?
For Yarat Contemporary I was lucky to have a really big team with me. I work collaboratively with Benito, my partner. Anyone that makes ambitious presentations, even if they're showing paintings or sculptures, you need a team. For me, I was very lucky with Art Night. I had a very good team, but outside of that and in the studio I'm working with my partner, who is also an artist. He provides me with both an artistic and technical perspective. I'm not very good with three-dimensional space unless I'm actually in the space. He's able to really help think about the positioning of objects within a space. As you can imagine we have really intense conversations as it can be quite frustrating sometimes if you're working with your partner.

The Tramway is quite similar, but it's a very different space. It's quite small compared to Yarat but it's still a good sized space. The space feels quite intense, which I think is good. It will go back to this idea of feeling confronted with a lot of objects and sounds. It will hopefully feel quite primal in that regard, whereas at Yarat, it felt a bit more spacey. It was really beautiful and it flowed well because you have a lot of space in between the different elements.

Then with De La Warr, it will change again because that space is very different. It's very long with large windows. It's beautiful. I've decided to make a new work, a large scale wall painting which I think will be really nice. The exhibition at the De La Warr will be broken up into three spaces. The middle space will be similar to Art Night, Yarat and Tramway where the room will be carpeted with the film screening and the large orca sculpture. Then with the other rooms, I will show some new works. I think, just for the sake of audience, I'm interested in having more object-based works presented so people are able to look at how those elements engage within the space, outside of any media presentations. I'm thinking more about the tactility of objects or how garments are hung in the space.

I'm doing a group show in Melbourne, Australia with seven other artists. I'll have my own room. I've decided to show a video from 2017. That's a two-screen projection, so I'll have one on each wall. I've been considering including a giant painting or theatrical landscape as well. Next year, I'm doing a show in Canada and then at Leeds Art Gallery at the end of the year. I need to think about what form those shows will take. I always start with the idea, that comes first. I'm very slow otherwise. Sometimes when I panic about time I just start making stuff, but then realise I'm just wasting materials. Sometimes, even though it can be painful, there always needs to be an understanding and motivational drive as to why I'm making certain things.
Are you in your studio are five days a week?
I'm here seven days a week as I tend to waste a lot of time. I watch a lot of garbage TV, and then I sit around thinking. I look at the books, I listened to podcasts and read magazine. This consumes a lot of my time. Unfortunately, for me, because I work in that way, the work is very labour-intensive and I really don't sleep very much, which is not great. I've tried to think about ways in which I can be more organised and don't have to work like that. It's hard to find an alternative pace. You can't control what days are your most creative days, which is really hard. My ability to make work only comes out when there is fear involved. It's fear because you have a deadline. If you have a presentation and that presentation is incumbent on so many people and their livelihoods, you need to be ready. That ends up being my motivational factor. I don't know what it is. That seems to be a good motivating impulse for creativity, which I wish it wasn't. It's hard though as you can't switch it on and off. There's moments where I'm like, I'm never doing this to myself again.
It sounds like you've got an incredible support in your partner?
We work very collaboratively. I really don't think there's any other way to do it unless you have the resources and you're able to pay people. Even so, it's not the same because the commitment level is different. When you're working with people that are within your family sphere, whether that's blood-related, married or otherwise, it just makes a huge difference, especially when it comes to the support and trust that's involved. I feel very lucky.

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Zadie Xa For the latest instalment in my ongoing series of interviews I spoke to artist Zadie Xa. Born in Vancouver, Canada and currently living in London, Zadie has exhibited both in the UK and internationally working with performance, video, painting and textiles, exploring how different cultures…

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Zadie Xa (b.1983) is a Korean-Canadian artist with a strong focus on 'making', combining and exploring her own identity through film and performance, textiles and painting. Based in London since studying at the Royal College of Art, Xa investigates the issues of belonging and identity through an idiosyncratic lens, drawing influence from both the fantasy and the lived experience within the Korean diaspora. Her engagement with these issues of place and belonging become entirely relevant to current issues, where questions of self-identity within society are continually examined across all forms of media.

Xa recently had her first major solo show in London, HOMEBOY 3030: Return the Tiger 2 the Mountain, at Union Pacific in May 2018. The exhibition tactfully employed a mix of both textiles and painting, using a cross-cultural visual language that thinks about Korean histories and their intersection with a western setting. The tapestry-like costumes suspended from the ceilings had delicately appliquéd motifs which spoke to a Korean-aesthetic at the junction with western capitalism.

The costumes themselves signify the performative act of wearing clothes, all the while acting as the index of the body. In her words: "clothing allows you to change who you are; it mediates the person that you, on that particular day, wish to present to the world. I thought, really simply, if I were a performer what would I choose to cloak myself in? I was thinking a lot about ideas of magic and shape-shifting, the ideas of being a person in the diaspora, or anybody involved with identity politics, the idea of changing form, changing who you are, whether these ideas are people looking at you, or how you change, or how people perceive you, or how you then try to mask or manipulate aspects of who you are or what you look like, or just how you move through space."

Her interest in Korean histories is rooted in her own experience of the diaspora, with a particular focus on Korean Shamanism. For centuries Shamanism has been sidelined to the fringes of society by Korea's occupying powers and the growth of Christianity, but has seen a resurgence in recent decades. Because Shamans are almost entirely women, their role disrupts the highly patriarchal Korean culture, growing in relevance today where wider representation is increasingly demanded.

This October at Frieze, Zadie's own experience with performance will be materialised within a semi-closed structure, a solo booth with sliding door. Xa is creating a world where Eastern tradition clashes with western aesthetics. Visually complex and painstaking, her cloaks and masks all indicate the act of wearing, each with its own ceremonial quality, pushing for audience engagement. With upcoming exhibitions in Los Angeles, Mexico, and Tucson, Zadie Xa is an artist whose work is evolving, creating interesting dialogues that allow us to continually reassess locations of culture and identity.

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Zadie Xa (b.1983) is a Korean-Canadian artist with a strong focus on 'making', combining and exploring her own identity through film and performance, textiles and painting. Based in London since studying at the Royal College of Art, Xa investigates the issues of belonging and identity through an idiosyncratic lens, drawing influence from both the fantasy and the lived experience within the Korean diaspora.

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Three Thousand and Thirty High Priestess of Pluto Synthetic hair, dyed leather, on machine stitched and hand-sewn fabric / Dimensions variable 2016 / Courtesy of the artist. SVN Stacks/Moon Marauder Synthetic hair on machine stitched and hand-sewn fabric / Dimensions variable 2015 / Courtesy of the artist.

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DLWP, The De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, East Sussex

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'Zadie Xa's reanimation of forgotten feminist myths' - TANK Magazine.

Showcasing a major new multimedia project, Zadie Xa creates a sub-aquatic marine environment, inviting audiences to enter into an immersive world by way of atmospheric lighting, surround-sound, large-scale video projections, sculptures and costumes.

Xa brings together imagined and learned Korean folklore, transforming diasporic knowledge into new realities. Within her immersive world, she presents an origin story inspired by Korean creation myths, centred on the giant goddess Grandmother Mago (Magohalmi). Exploring the passing down of ancestral knowledge through the matrilineal social structures that are based on the separation of responsibilities between male and female deities in the creation of the universe, the work confronts the goddesses' shift in cultural status over time, from central to marginal.

Throughout her practice, Xa uses water and marine ecologies as metaphors for exploring the unknown, whilst also alluding to abstract notions of homeland, having grown up on the west coast of Canada. Often creating fantastical underwater realms, the exhibition features a large-scale, surround-sound video projection of the ocean, and a pod of orcas - a theme which is then revisited in a series of sculptures. The final element of the exhibition is comprised of costumes and masks made in collaboration with Benito Mayor Vallejo, and originally used during performances at Art Night 2019 and the 58th Venice Biennale.

Read an interview with Zadie Xa in Ocula magazine.

Zadie Xa uses live performance, video, painting and textiles to question how cultures inform identities and notions of self. Her layered costume works are sites for exploring personal cultural histories that stitch together personally relevant imagery sourced from music, digital space, fashion and art history. Xa has developed a system of personalised symbols that propose entirely new images and objects, creating a personal visual language for articulating nuanced Asian identity narratives, which are frequently situated within fantastical or supernatural realms.

Child of Magohalmi and the Echoes of Creation is a co-commission with Art Night, London (22 June 2019), YARAT Contemporary Art Space, Baku (12 July - 29 September 2019), Tramway, Glasgow (26 October - 16 December 2019) and De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill.
A note from Zadie Xa Artists' Biography Staying locally Travel information Accessibility Facilities for disabled visitors

Large print season brochures
Facilities for the hard-of-hearing

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Zadie Xa: Child of Magohalmi and the Echoes of Creation - DLWP, The De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, East Sussex

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'Zadie Xa's reanimation of forgotten feminist myths' - TANK Magazine . Showcasing a major new multimedia project, Zadie Xa creates a sub-aquatic marine environment, inviting audiences to enter into an immersive world by way of atmospheric lighting, surround-sound, large-scale video projections, sculptures and costumes.

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Ancestor Work: Trickster Gift / Re-remembrance

2022
Acrylic on machine sewn and hand stitched linen, denim and hemlock wood
165 x 175 cm / 65 x 68 7/8 in

Ancestor Work: Re-remember / Black Water Tiger

2022
Acrylic on machine sewn and hand stitched linen, denim and hemlock wood
165 x 175 cm / 65 x 68 7/8 in

Zadie Xa

Zadie Xa (b. 1983 Vancouver, Canada; lives and works London, UK) was born in Vancouver, Canada on the unceded, ancestral and continually asserted territories of xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Her work is informed by her experiences within the Korean diaspora, traditional folk tales and mythology as well as the environmental and cultural context of the Pacific Northwest.

Her work often features garments, including cloaks and masks, used for live performance and within installation or moving image. Xa's work has been shown at The National Gallery, London, UK; Haus Der Kunst, Munich, Germany; the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, China; The 58th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; Serpentine Galleries, London, UK, and MoMa PS1, New York NY.

On View in New York

Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, ' The New Bend ' is on view until 2 Apr 2022.

Images: Portrait of Zadie Xa, Courtesy of the artist

Ancestor Work: Re-remember / Black Water Tiger

2022
Acrylic on machine sewn and hand stitched linen, denim and hemlock wood
165 x 175 cm / 65 x 68 7/8 in

Zadie Xa

Zadie Xa (b. 1983 Vancouver, Canada; lives and works London, UK) was born in Vancouver, Canada on the unceded, ancestral and continually asserted territories of xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Her work is informed by her experiences within the Korean diaspora, traditional folk tales and mythology as well as the environmental and cultural context of the Pacific Northwest.

Her work often features garments, including cloaks and masks, used for live performance and within installation or moving image. Xa's work has been shown at The National Gallery, London, UK; Haus Der Kunst, Munich, Germany; the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, China; The 58th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; Serpentine Galleries, London, UK, and MoMa PS1, New York NY.

On View in New York

Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, ' The New Bend ' is on view until 2 Apr 2022.

Images: Portrait of Zadie Xa, Courtesy of the artist

Zadie Xa

Zadie Xa (b. 1983 Vancouver, Canada; lives and works London, UK) was born in Vancouver, Canada on the unceded, ancestral and continually asserted territories of xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Her work is informed by her experiences within the Korean diaspora, traditional folk tales and mythology as well as the environmental and cultural context of the Pacific Northwest.

Her work often features garments, including cloaks and masks, used for live performance and within installation or moving image. Xa's work has been shown at The National Gallery, London, UK; Haus Der Kunst, Munich, Germany; the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, China; The 58th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; Serpentine Galleries, London, UK, and MoMa PS1, New York NY.

On View in New York

Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, ' The New Bend ' is on view until 2 Apr 2022.

Images: Portrait of Zadie Xa, Courtesy of the artist

Her work often features garments, including cloaks and masks, used for live performance and within installation or moving image. Xa's work has been shown at The National Gallery, London, UK; Haus Der Kunst, Munich, Germany; the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, China; The 58th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; Serpentine Galleries, London, UK, and MoMa PS1, New York NY.

On View in New York

Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, ' The New Bend ' is on view until 2 Apr 2022.

Images: Portrait of Zadie Xa, Courtesy of the artist

On View in New York

Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, ' The New Bend ' is on view until 2 Apr 2022.

Images: Portrait of Zadie Xa, Courtesy of the artist

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2022
Acrylic on machine sewn and hand stitched linen, denim and hemlock wood
165 x 175 cm / 65 x 68 7/8 in

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Qualeasha Wood Weaves Cyberculture Into Tapestries

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Qualeasha Wood Weaves Cyberculture Into Tapestries

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Meet Qualeasha Wood, the Artist Weaving Cyberculture Into Tapestries

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Meet the artist who interrogates the cultural consumption of Black women through self-referential, Internet-inspired textile work.

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Qualeasha Wood | The [Black] Madonna/Whore Complex | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Textile Artist Qualeasha Wood on Opening Doors for Young Women

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The rising art-world star talks to Bazaar for the Icons issue

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New York 's "21 Questions" is back with an eye on creative New Yorkers. Qualeasha Wood is a textile artist who explores Black identity and cyberculture, often through woven selfies. She's a 2021-22 resident artist at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The Met acquired her weaving The [Black] Madonna/Whore Complex in April, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston acquired Foreva by Cardi B last week.

What's hanging above your couch?
My partner and I don't have a couch in our apartment. It's a sore spot: We carried it up four flights of stairs only for it to get stuck in the hallway before we could get it inside. We found out it's because the fourth and fifth floors in my building were an addition, and the stairwell measurements aren't the same. But above where it would have gone is a big circle mirror with gold spray-painted trim and shelves with a bunch of crystals on them - some huge chunks of amethyst, citrine because it's my birth crystal, obsidian, quartz, so many things. They bring good natural energy into the space.

What's the first job you had in New York?
I hate to be the person that's like, "My first job was being an artist in New York," but it was. No one ever wanted to give me a job here. I've applied to so many jobs, internships, and apprenticeships and only got one interview in four years. So I made art work for me, even if it was just selling something small.

What color are you always drawn to?
I love anything that's red. Depending on the context, red could mean so many different things: It's dangerous, it's exciting, it's alluring, and it's kind of sexy.

What work of art or artifact are you most surprised you own?
That would be Kim Kardashian's book, . It was actually a gift from a friend years ago. At the time, I didn't know it would have an impact on my life. I just thought it was so silly. I used it as a paperweight or something to write notes on. Then one day I just flipped through it and was inspired by the audacity of Kim Kardashian marketing herself to the degree that she could make a book of selfies she's taken over the years.

Which New Yorker would you want to hang out with?
Cardi B is so smart and creative, and I respect the variety she's had in her career. I feel like we would get along. She has great taste in food, and I have amazing taste in food, and we would go out and eat crab legs and talk about politics.

What's the last thing you made with your hands?
I've been working on beading a tapestry for the last three days, but the last thing I literally made with my hands is a bowl of Honeycomb cereal.

Is there one thing you own multiple versions of?
I've been collecting different Uno card sets for the past three years. I've always been a big Uno player, and my collection started innocently: I had regular Uno, then I got the Minimalista very sleek black cards. I convinced the president of RISD to buy me as compensation for something I did. I'm now in the process of trying to buy all of the Mattel Creations Uno packs. I have a Nina Chanel Abney one that was a gift, a Keith Haring set, and a VeeFriends set. There are like seven more I need to get.

What New York City museum do you always go back to?
I grew up going to museums and was always so bored. But I loved the American Museum of Natural History. I didn't travel much when I was growing up, so going there was a way to experience the world. I just think it's so marvelous to think about the world beyond me as a human and all of these things that were living and breathing and making up an ecosystem.

What do you always have next to your computer?
Something to drink, which is the last thing you really want near any electronics. I've spilled quite a few onto my computers and keyboards. Right now I have four bottles of water on my desk.

Where is the best view of the city?
Controversial, but New Jersey. Everyone doesn't like that. But growing up in New Jersey in a beach town and being able to see a vague amount of the New York skyline was something that made the world feel huge and magnificent. For New Year's, I visited a friend who lives in Weehawken and we went to Hamilton Park at 11:59 p.m., right before the ball dropped. The whole city was lit up, and the skyline was so beautiful. I think it provided a lot of perspective. If you're in New York, you can't see it that way. You have to be on the outside looking in.

What building or object do you want to redesign every time you see it?
The Guggenheim is my least favorite thing to look at. Maybe it's tied with the Vessel. It's always looked like a fever dream - this big, white swirling object that feels like it was thrown into the city with no consideration for what's around it. I feel dizzy when I'm inside since everything is in a circle. I think it needs a new material or a splash of color. Something that's more grounding.

What's one thing you would change about your field?
If I could ban networking, I would. I wish it were easier to form genuine connections with people, especially with other artists. I ran into someone I know recently, and he just started rattling off his accomplishments, and it was disappointing. Conversations become about seeing what another person is doing and using that as a way to affirm or judge yourself. The last thing I ever want to talk about with other artists is the art that we're making. I love talking about art in the world, what film we just saw, and what music we're listening to. I don't love when people are like, "Oh, let's go to your studio and just hang out."We're artists all the time; I'm interested in who we are outside of that.

If you could live anywhere in New York City, where would it be?
If I were ridiculously wealthy, I would buy a warehouse loft in Dumbo with an elevator that goes straight into my apartment. Dumbo is a nice spot where you're near the bridge with easy access to Manhattan, there's good food to eat, and the real estate is amazing. There's a romanticism you're always chasing after when you're an artist in the city, and I think of that Dumbo space as, Oh, I've made it.

What would you hoard if it stopped being produced?
I already did this. I got really attached to Uncrustables at the beginning of the year. I never had them as a kid because my mom was just like, "Why would I buy you a premade peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich when I could just make one?" I always have a hard time figuring out what to eat when I'm working, so I ordered a box and was hooked. I became emotionally dependent on eating one every day. Then, suddenly, it started to get denied on all my grocery orders. I was like, What's going on?! I was doing so much research. I found out that Smucker's wasn't producing as many because an ingredient was hard to get due to the pandemic. A friend who was visiting Michigan called me and said, "They have Uncrustables here. How many do you want?" I said eight boxes, and I'm still working through them.

What do you do to get out of a creative rut?
I make a playlist. I try to think of a vibe I'm going for with the project or where it needs to go. I know what playlist I was listening to for every piece I've made. There are certain songs I have to hear to feel like I can get anything accomplished. "Bound," by Kanye West, was a song I overplayed while I was making The [Black] Madonna/Whore Complex. I also listened to "Trader Joe" by Junglepussy and a lot of Drake and BbyMutha.

Where was your first NYC apartment, and how much was the rent?
The one I'm in now in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens. It's $2,300 a month, and thank God I share the rent with my partner. Everywhere I've lived in New York before, I was staying with friends on their couches. This is the first place where I've had my name on a lease.

Where in the city do you go to be alone?
At a coffee shop, I can blend in and become invisible for a few hours. The last one I went to was Milk and Honey, in Flatbush.

Worst piece of career advice you've ever gotten?
"You should wait." I had people tell me I should wait to apply to the Studio Museum. I didn't listen, and now I'm an artist in residence. I got "You should wait until you're older," especially when I was applying to my grad program. Everyone was like, "Why are you doing this? Now? It's going to benefit your career more later." And I was like, Well, who's to say what benefits my career? I don't think it's a malicious thing to say; I just think that we know our own timing, and we should trust what feels right in the moment. A lot of the things I have been able to accomplish in my career happened because I didn't wait.

What have you given away to someone that you wish you could get back?
In fourth grade, I let my friend borrow my Dreaming of You CD, by Selena. I asked to have it back for weeks and weeks, and she finally admitted that it got stuck in her mom's car's CD slot. My mom wouldn't buy me another one, and I never got another copy. It was one of my most played CDs, and I never got over losing it.

What's your favorite NYC restaurant and regular order?
Melba's, in Harlem. Fried catfish and eggnog waffles are the only thing I get there to this day. It comes with strawberry butter and maple syrup, but I add hot sauce to it. My mom's from the South, so I grew up eating catfish. It's kind of hard to get good soul food in New York, and this is my favorite place for it.

What descriptive phrase do you want on your obit headline?
It would be awesome if it was just a link to my Instagram or Twitter so that people could get to know me as I experienced me instead of someone else telling people how they should remember me.

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Qualeasha Wood Wants to Get Crab Legs With Cardi B.

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New York 's "21 Questions" is back with an eye on creative New Yorkers. Qualeasha Wood is a textile artist who explores Black identity and cyberculture, often through woven selfies. She's a 2021-22 resident artist at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

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Text and various letterforms frequently appear on the surfaces of your work. When did text first become part of the visual landscape? Where does the text come from?
I began working with text when I took an interest in design, which ended pretty quickly but the thing that did stick around was an interest in text and communication design. I became pretty obsessed with how different scripts and fonts told their own different story. I worked in calligraphy and I began to focus on the letter form. I developed this understanding that text functioned like color and that it too had its own personality. I began adding it to my work when I began looking into symbols and their meanings. With texting, character limits and abbreviations, two letters in the right context can represent a whole thought. I wanted to incorporate text abstractly, seeing what sounds I could evoke, or words I could communicate Thinking of language and communication as color I incorporate hand painted signage, and find ways to mold letters or fill the negative space of letter forms.

In addition to rope and canvas, you use other materials as well. Where do you source these items from? Does their provenance have any significance? In particular, I am thinking of the piece, Hanging Shield, 2019 from your recent exhibition, Go Away Road, at Loyal Gallery in Stockholm, or the hammock work from NADA this year!
I am usually sourcing materials based on their relationship to painting techniques, looking for textures that will convey the marks and lines from my drawings. The hammock is a new addition to my materials and I couldn't be more excited. I currently have a hammock work on display at the nada house on Governors Island with Cooper Cole Gallery. I was initially drawn to its ability to blend with the rope. I enjoy how adding common materials to art can really questions our perception in many ways. With the rope, there is the transformation of it to line, mark and shape. The object begins to defy your understanding of its uses and common environment, taking you on a journey through the material history.

Your work seems to be becoming larger in scale as of late. Can you talk about how you approach scale?
I think it has been a natural progression, at one time I made really huge drawings. I think that scale is quite tricky but I really think that scale finds you, depending on the subject matter or materials. For me the hammocks have introduced a sense of openness, along with new interests leading me towards bigger works. I am very engaged with the negative space that my work creates, searching for more has lead me to larger works.

Your work casts unique, colorful shadows on the wall, adding an exciting visual element not present in typical works on canvas or 3D sculptures not exhibited on a flat surface. Have you ever created purely sculptural work shown in a 3D context? If so, how do these relate to
your wall works?
I've studied and presented sculpture that has primarily been centered around the image. Thinking of the surface and how I can manipulate the way images were presented. It has definitely influenced my approach to presentation, now I use that small space between the wall and the works by painting the backs with saturated colors and extending the painting into the shadow.

How do you typically adhere or attach surfaces together?
I use a combination of techniques, it typically begins with archival glue, followed by sewing or staples (for works attached to wood panel). I learned most of these techniques doing chine-collé and bookbinding. I reference those techniques for my approach to my painted canvases. Cutting and collaging unstretched paintings allow it to become part of the image and not just the process.

Using the materials of rope and canvas (among others) which are by nature pliable, and saturating them with paint, the materials become self-reliant, and self-stable and firmly able to hold their shape in space. Can you talk more about the transformation of the raw materials into the final works, and the significance of this process?
Yes all of the marks and layers of my work come together like a web, holding form. It can be described as self-reliant, relying mostly on gravity to allow the image to come into place. The countless layers of paint add firmness to the works , creating curves and valleys that are the fun and unpredictable part of the work. The process is inspired by painting, and that search to find beauty in the mistakes. With the amount of change the works go through, Its extremely significant, a replication of a drawing really lacks that transformative journey.

Valerie Kamen wrote of your work "Driven by the desire to challenge the often limited depictions of outer space as a dead place outside of nature, in these paintings Williams's use of metallics and earth tones present an environment that while foreign, is not cold or vacant." Can you elaborate on this use of color to create a new environment?
Color is a huge tool for me and a way that I bring an environment to the works. I make my work with the experience in mind. Being that I want my work to be open and abstract, I allow the colors to be a tool in the story or theme I am working in.

What are the themes you are currently most interested in exploring?
Currently I have been thinking about relational perception-similar to how it functions in Titchener circles. How surrounding elements can affect our understanding. I've interpreted that by looking at and finding ways to incorporate the lines of charts, graphs, maps and venn diagrams. Specifically I have been interested in the versatility of the circle, looking at how artists like John Baldessari uses the circle to represent the human or Atsuka Tanaka can transform that same shape to poetic code.

What is one of the best exhibitions you have seen recently?
I am still moved by the experience of the Hilma Af Klint show at the Guggenheim and the Robert Rauschenberg show at LACMA. I love how immersive the two shows were and I found both very inspiring. If I had to choose the best, for a while will be the Soul of A Nation show that I got a chance to see it at the Brooklyn Museum. So much amazing work and such an important experience, rooms curated to highlight a large range of interests and approaches to art.

Who are some of the artists you look at most often?
Betye Saar, Senga Negundi, Terry Adkins, Howardena Pindell, David Hammons, Atsuko Tanaka, El Anstsul, kind of stay at the forefront of my mind visually and conceptually as they all transform materials. While I aspire to many achievements that happen in the work of artists like Phylida Barlow, Eva Hesse and Elizabeth Murray that have done so much to push the place between painting and sculpture.

Is there any advice you have received that you remember often?
I always hold onto advice from older artists. I remember once being told that "being an artist was not about what you make, but how much you wanted to make it." Thinking about that often definitely keeps away any expectations. It reminds me not to expect anything from myself or any artwork and instead enjoy every part of making, looking and thinking about it.

What are you reading?
I'm usually reading a few books at once. I'm currently reading White Teeth by Zadie Smith and I flip through and keep on hand poetry like Hugh Prather. I'm slowly reading Mule Bone, a play that was written but never finished by Zora Neal Hurston and Langston Hughes. I stumbled upon the book and was in love with how the writing and text looked so much like text messages from today. I wanted to see if I could read a script and it is very interesting.

Whats up next for you?
Right now I am preparing for solo shows and I am really excited for a fellowship that I will be participating in this summer at the Robert Blackburn printmaking studio in the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. Printmaking was a big part of my education and I'm excited to see what text elements I can bring into my work with screen printing.
Thanks so much for talking with us! To find out more about Rachel and her work, check out her gallery website.

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Text and various letterforms frequently appear on the surfaces of your work. When did text first become part of the visual landscape? Where does the text come from? I began working with text when I took an interest in design, which ended pretty quickly but the thing that did stick around was an interest in text and communication design.

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On making work for yourself and the freedom of play - Rachel Eulena Williams

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On making work for yourself and the freedom of play - Rachel Eulena Williams

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Are you someone who goes into the studio every day? Do you ever take long stretches away from your studio?
Having a space and going there and just doing a little something every day-it's powerful because it's a practice, and one day it just kind of clicks. I try to go into the studio every day. It's important to do something, even if it's just looking at the work or just mixing the color.

Sometimes it feels like a requirement for me to go every day, but I just recently had a time where I was away from the studio and it was actually really good for me. With quarantine, there was a month where I was like, "I don't know if I should even leave," so I'm getting this time away and I got to really think about my work and kind of think about the process of it. It was really helpful. There's so many things happening in my studio, and when I kind of stepped away from it, I was able to think, "Where can I use these parts and what are they doing?" It was something I hadn't done before because I hadn't had that time of really thinking about the work, kind of missing it, feeling like I want to imagine being able to make it, and so I'm going to make these drawings where I pretend I'm making it and it was really great.

Also, drawing is so important for me. Sometimes, if I go into the studio, I can forget to draw. Having just focused on drawing again almost puts you back in a place where you're thinking a lot more about the process and not so much the actions of [the work]. Drawing is the only thing that's been constant. You can look at a piece of paper and have this understanding of it your whole life because it's the same uniform size, so when I'm drawing, I think it's been the place where I can be most creative and really process things.

Some of the time I will draw and get ideas from it, or I just draw to remind myself of how I want my work to look. It's a place that I can always look at and reference for myself as the most exciting and freeing place. I'm always imagining the marks on the drawings as my sculptures, and so there's a place where I know that if I'm making these marks, they would relate to this work I would make it in real life, so that's a part of it as well.
A compelling part of your work is its in-betweenness-a painting is also a sculpture, a line, drawing.
My work has always been just searching for this place in between all three of those things. I'm thinking of how I can translate each part into something that relates to painting, sculpture, and figuring out how I can make something that breaks the mold of how things should be read. There's a lot of play with materials and the materials speak to line and form just as much as the color does, and I think that expanding it and pushing it outside of just having a square becomes a conversation about how things can connect. I've always thought of the work as something that improves the way that things connect and have a connecting meeting place.

For me, play is vital. Art is the opposite of what we have in society, the structure. When you're playing, it gives you this freedom regardless of whatever the subject matter is. My studio is usually filled with so much information, and it's coming from all these different places where I can't even remember where it comes from because I'm holding onto things that I like from past pieces, or things are coming off of things, moving on to other pieces so that they can connect.

I'm working with the materials and thinking about them in a sculptural way, but at the same time, painting comes into it and creates something that is two dimensional. Your eye is going in between what is real and what is fake and there's attraction to it, which elements of it you are more drawn to. I think that's what's enjoyable about looking at the work, that there is that in-between-the color that you see and what that represents, and then the texture and what that represents, and how they play not only with the space, but the wall and the whiteness.
What feeds your creativity when you're not actively working in your studio?
I'm inspired by any type of art. I'm always interested in dance and theater and any type of way people are expressing themselves. I'm always reading different types of things and my imagination can get very lost in it. I like when I'm seeing different types of expression in real life. I feel like it's important to check in with all the other systems of expression: handmade patterns, textiles, ritual, fashion, symbolic languages, theater, music, dance, and any type of speeches.

Speeches can be very inspirational. Especially right now. People are paying attention to so many public speakers, and there's so much courage and so much freedom in that. When I'm watching speeches, I can get lost in it and be inspired by all the speakers' different thoughts and what they're trying to convince me of... I mean, you never know where you're going to go with it, but there's something interesting about that person having the ability to do that.
I'm thinking about the cadence and rhythm of speeches relating to movement and dance and some of the forms in your work. Language is another avenue where it seems like you explore play, with abstracted shapes of letters and suggestions of sounds.
Using written language in work evokes this type of sound or rhythm or speech. When you see the words in there, it becomes not only the letter, it also becomes the sound and it also becomes a line and it feels out of place, but also familiar. I like the idea that the text can be abstracted and it becomes another integration into finding some sort of thing in life that I can work into the piece. A lot of moments will be chopped up in this way; I want the work to feel like it's coming from an intersection, so the speech and all of the sound and integration of those parts into the works are always evolving. It's the part of my practice that I feel like I am trying to understand on my own, that personal expression and sound and just relating that part into the work. It's such a growing part in my work and I hope to expand on that.
What do you look for in your creative community?
I look for artists that are playful and diverse, not working in a similar way. It's interesting to have relationships with as many different styles of work and artists as you can and to understand that is important. At the same time, I do appreciate communities that are singular. I always think it's a good thing to know as much as you can about different types of people and different types of work that you don't know. It's important to have a community of work where you have artists of every type of work that are also playful. When I think about my community and the people that I know, I think it's important to embrace and understand every type of work. It's really important to have women support groups, or painting support groups. When I think of an ideal community, I think of a school setting, not in the sense that you have teachers, but that you have as many different interests as you can in one room.
What advice would you tell younger artists or your younger self?
I saw some great advice about wanting to be an artist or thinking about being an artist, [that it's] really only for yourself. I mean, of course you hope to be able to share it with the world, but it's all about how much you want to make this actual thing, because the more that you want to make it and the more that you're connected to it, regardless of what others think, I think is when people will actually start to connect to it because it has an artistic interest from you.

I've always kept myself going by reminding myself that it's only about how much I want it and I've always thought of it as a space for myself. Everybody has different practices and people might be making work to speak to many different types of subjects, but specifically for myself, I've always remembered that and thought of that as the thing to keep in mind when being an artist-no one is going to like it unless you love it, [unless] you are interested and care about it more than you expect others to care about it.
What's a creative or studio habit you have to fight against?
I'm using a lot of layers in the work and sometimes I feel so attached to certain things and I feel like I have to choose those. There's a process of choosing and I feel like sometimes I have to fight against not wanting to let go of it. It becomes about having that distance from the work. So that's kind of why, again, I like to go and just sit and look at things and really ask where certain things are going and what's the energy of my work-looking at it really helps just step back.
How do you decide something is done?
With my work there are so many layers and history to it and I'm constantly building off of what's there and trying to create this new story on top of it. I think [it's done] when there's a balance between the energy of it. I think it's a very abstract practice in the way that the work feels done. It usually has to have this interaction with negative space in a way that creates a mystery with how the form is shaped or even created. When I feel like it's done, it has a certain balance between the things that I'm trying to achieve in my work in general.
What questions are on your mind?
I feel like the only questions on my mind have to do with social justice. That's always on my mind. With my work, I'm always asking myself how I can expand in a way that feels very intentional. I'm always reaching for that, so I'm always questioning how I can have this seamless entry through pieces. In my most recent work with the rope, there's a lot of using it to its best advantage. Allowing it to hang, but also be a structure-it's a moment where I'm asking myself these questions and figuring out how to get to the next step in executing and changing the way that I'm working. It's a lot of process.

I've been asking myself, "What are the ways that I can fundamentally make the things I need and then also expand that and make more things?" I think a lot of the time with my work, it just feels like this thing I want to happen, and it's like I'm constantly practicing a way to get there.

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On making work for yourself and the freedom of play

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Are you someone who goes into the studio every day? Do you ever take long stretches away from your studio? Having a space and going there and just doing a little something every day-it's powerful because it's a practice, and one day it just kind of clicks.

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Rachel Eulena Williams weaves poetry and abstraction in Brussels

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Rachel Eulena Williams weaves poetry and abstraction in Brussels

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The work of Rachel Eulena Williams is not strictly painting or sculpture. It occupies an intuitive and improvisational middle ground: fragmented compositions that are hand-glued, stitched, knotted and lashed together but also painted, with pigment functioning as both essential structure and embellishment.

Despite this layered approach, the Miami-born, New York-based artist always begins with the same humble material: rolls of untreated canvas and cotton. In 'Joy & Rain' at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, Williams' vibrant new work presents tensions: between two and three dimensions; frugality and opulence; hope and pain; liquid and solid; 'high' and 'low' artistic endeavours.

Though fundamentally abstract, there are suggestions of recognisable, albeit fragmented forms in these contorted assemblages: perhaps the subtle curve of a body or a cluster of flower petals. As anticipated in the show's title, Williams' new work makes use of the raindrop motif in droplets of fluid, blue-hued pigments. This is also a nod to Melvonna Ballenger's 1978 film Rain (Nyesha), which explores a female journey towards self-awareness and empowerment, and also a poetic meditation on the potency of rainy days. The show is a tale of optimism and angst. Bold, luminous colours meet the complex social implications of cotton and rope; rain as a metaphor for melancholy and renewal.

Williams' work can be seen in the context of Black American artists' contribution to modern art, with particular reference to pioneering women such as Betye Saar or Howardena Pinnell. It is a play on structures, both literal and metaphorical. As the artist explains: '"Joy & Rain" is both personal and comprehensive. For this exhibition, I dove deeper into the poetic and social narrative that stimulates my work.'

Her unorthodox use of materials frees painting from the rigidity of the formal canvas; her bold palette liberates forms from Western art history's systematic othering of colour, sentiments reflected in the titles of the works: Strange Woman, American Fruit and Black and Blue. Williams' work, retrospective and hyper-contemporary, forms part of the ongoing reconstruction of art history.

INFORMATION

Rachel Eulena Williams, 'Joy & Rain', until 19 February 2022, Xavier Hufkens, Brussels. xavierhufkens.com (opens in new tab)

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Rachel Eulena Williams weaves poetry and abstraction in Brussels

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The work of Rachel Eulena Williams is not strictly painting or sculpture. It occupies an intuitive and improvisational middle ground: fragmented compositions that are hand-glued, stitched, knotted and lashed together but also painted, with pigment functioning as both essential structure and embellishment.

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Red, Invisible, Blues

2022
Acrylic, canvas, wood, rope, polyester, dye
203.2 x 152.4 cm / 80 x 60 in

© Rachel Eulena Williams, courtesy the artist and Canada, New York; photo: Joe DeNardo.

Rachel Eulena Williams

Rachel Eulena Williams (b. 1991 Miami, FL; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is an artist whose work displays an unusual level of candor, invention and lightness. Her painted constructions employ the language of abstract painting but are transformed through her own approach to material. Finding a balance between painting and sculpture, Williams applies large swaths of color made from painted canvases that she subsequently cuts up and reconfigures. The collage-like works are tied together with sewing and rope which acts both pictorially and creates marks inside her compositions.

Rachel Eulena Williams in her studio. Photo by Marquale Ashley. Courtesy of the artist and Canada, New York.

Williams received her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; Ceysson & Benetiere, New York, Saint Etienne & Luxembourg; The Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; and Loyal Gallery, Sweden. Her work is included in the collections such as the Pérez Art Museum, Miami and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.

On view in Los Angeles

Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, ' The New Bend ' is on view until 30 Dec 2022.

Rachel Eulena Williams

Rachel Eulena Williams (b. 1991 Miami, FL; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is an artist whose work displays an unusual level of candor, invention and lightness. Her painted constructions employ the language of abstract painting but are transformed through her own approach to material. Finding a balance between painting and sculpture, Williams applies large swaths of color made from painted canvases that she subsequently cuts up and reconfigures. The collage-like works are tied together with sewing and rope which acts both pictorially and creates marks inside her compositions.

Rachel Eulena Williams in her studio. Photo by Marquale Ashley. Courtesy of the artist and Canada, New York.

Williams received her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; Ceysson & Benetiere, New York, Saint Etienne & Luxembourg; The Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; and Loyal Gallery, Sweden. Her work is included in the collections such as the Pérez Art Museum, Miami and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.

On view in Los Angeles

Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, ' The New Bend ' is on view until 30 Dec 2022.

Williams received her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; Ceysson & Benetiere, New York, Saint Etienne & Luxembourg; The Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; and Loyal Gallery, Sweden. Her work is included in the collections such as the Pérez Art Museum, Miami and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.

On view in Los Angeles

Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, ' The New Bend ' is on view until 30 Dec 2022.

On view in Los Angeles

Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, ' The New Bend ' is on view until 30 Dec 2022.

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2022 Acrylic, canvas, wood, rope, polyester, dye 203.2 x 152.4 cm / 80 x 60 in © Rachel Eulena Williams, courtesy the artist and Canada, New York; photo: Joe DeNardo. Rachel Eulena Williams (b. 1991 Miami, FL; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is an artist whose work displays an unusual level of candor, invention and lightness.

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The Modern Institute is pleased to present Rachel Eulena Williams in the Osborne Street space for her debut exhibition in the UK. Williams has been gaining increasing recognition for a practice that pushes the formal boundaries of painting and radical material exploration, embodying a sculptural form beyond its canvas dimensions. This new collection of works demonstrates Williams's continuous evolvement in her visual language and critique of colour and material, with each visceral piece breathing a renewed vitality into the gallery space.

Titled in relation to the recent snowstorms in the US, the works were conceived in the winter, apparent in the cool hues of blue and lilac that are interrupted by warm fluorescent oranges. Williams describes snow as a metaphor for this series: a middle ground of water, neither aqueous nor frozen yet possessing a transformational, near spiritual quality. This is clear by the presence of her tondo paintings that inevitably call to mind religious Renaissance paintings, in addition to their physical essence that echo the bodily gestures behind Ed Clark's circular works, and the Gutai group, particularly the innovative concepts surrounding play and use of everyday objects championed by Atsuko Tanaka.

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Viewing Room: Rachel Eulena Williams - Silk Cotton Snow - The Modern Institute

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The Modern Institute is pleased to present Rachel Eulena Williams in the Osborne Street space for her debut exhibition in the UK. Williams has been gaining increasing recognition for a practice that pushes the formal boundaries of painting and radical material exploration, embodying a sculptural form beyond its canvas dimensions.

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Rachel Eulena Williams’s Threads of Abstraction

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Rachel Eulena Williams’s Threads of Abstraction

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Over the past few years, Rachel Eulena Williams has honed a distinctive style of brightly colored, multi-dimensional abstract paintings. The artist reconfigures canvases that she removes from conventional supports, and collages a myriad of diverse materials onto them. While always interesting, recently the works have taken a decided turn for the better. The artist, who has been exhibiting since 2017, has developed a painting practice that eschews slick production. In her first solo show at Canada, she makes a case for the transgression of aesthetic conventions in abstraction, and the sociopolitical significance of such a transgression.

The show is titled Tracing Memory. It signals Williams's interest in painting as a medium capable of containing layered histories. The 12 works in the show make good use of ordinary materials: rope, staples, deconstructed hammocks, various textiles, archival glue, and paint are combined into hybrids that resemble anything from totems to maps, mandalas, or protective shields. These works - some of which appear strikingly unresolved - occupy a middle ground between painting and sculpture, with rope and other textiles caught in a tenuous balance.

"Red Grey Clay" (2020) is one such work. A dynamic interplay of canvas and cut fabric pieces in irregular shapes, painted lemon yellow, cool gray, and orange-red, hang from strands of yellow- and white-painted rope that fan out from a small metal ring. A light gray circle is collaged near the center, flanked by dangling threads of painted rope.

Rachel Eulena Williams, "Red Grey Clay" (2020), silkscreen on card, dye and acrylic paint on hammock, canvas and cotton rope, 72 × 62 × 3 inches (courtesy the artist and Canada Gallery)

The relationship between the upper half and lower half produces a remarkable sense of tension; the work is a study in contradictions: taut, slack, poised, resistant. It also has undeniable material significance. Rope connotes multiple implications, from there horrific (hanging or lynching) to the mundane (towing and hauling and tying things up) and recreational (relaxing in a hammock). These layers of meaning provide a clue to the artist's intentions - what may seem at first purely sensual and aesthetic also has social implications.

Drawing is central to Williams's practice. While her use of dangling threads and collage suggests painterly gestures, her material explorations are related to non-painterly practices, including chine-collé and bookbinding. She often employs letters or text, not to develop a narrative, but to evoke sound.

Rachel Eulena Williams, "Cutting Stone" (2020), silkscreen on card, dye and acrylic paint on panel, canvas and cotton rope, 49 × 52 × 3 inches (courtesy the artist and Canada Gallery)

For all of Williams's formal experimentation, Tracing Memory relies heavily on a recurring tondo format, so familiar from Renaissance painting. "Cutting Stone" (2020), for instance, is a tondo with a washy, pale blue-gray fabric collage in the center. Prussian blue and slate gray triangles rotate on the top half, with crimson and orange expanses below. Her use of paint is matter-of-fact, unadorned, and incredibly satisfying. Short pieces of painted rope affixed to the edge of the work and collaged in the foreground lend it a drum-like appearance.

Williams is not alone in her exploration of fabric and everyday materials in service of social and personal aims; she is in good company. The past two years have seen a resurgence of artists in pursuit of this particular strain of abstraction, in shows such as Eric Mack: Lemme Walk Across the Room at the Brooklyn Museum (2019), Mike Cloud: Tears in Abstraction at Thomas Erben Gallery (2019), and Lauren Luloff's current show, Portraits of Alex and Other Murmurings at Ceysson & Bénétière.

Aesthetic precedents go back much further, however. In 2006, Katy Siegel mounted a traveling exhibition titled High Times/Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975. The show took a wide-angle view at an overlooked period of painting at a transitional moment in American society, set against the political turmoil of the late 1960s.

Rachel Eulena Williams, "Don't Have to Touch Me to Feel Me" (2020), silkscreen, acrylic paint, and dye on canvas, panel, and cotton rope, 67 × 143 × 3 inches (courtesy the artist and Canada Gallery)

That period, culturally defined by first-wave feminism, the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights movement, produced a generation of painters contending with an influx of new genres, including performance, video, and an expanded form of sculpture. Painters like Al Loving, Alan Shields, and Elizabeth Murray answered the call by way of deconstruction: putting their paintings on the floor, propping them up like tents, exploring bold color, and eliminating the rectangle altogether. Upending formal conventions, these artists encouraged viewers to question their structures and intended meanings, and in doing so, performed a kind of radical politics. They asserted that the way one addresses a form can alter the viewer's perception of the form and its meaning.

Some 50 years later, the cultural climate in the United States - marked by reactionary politics, polarization, and renewed Civil Rights movements - has produced a handful of artists who occupy similar territory, while much figurative painting appears stylistically conventional and politically polite at best, with a cozy relationship to the market.

Rachel Eulena Williams, "Orange Blood" (2020), acrylic paint and dye on canvas, panel, and cotton rope, 60 × 98 × 3 inches (courtesy the artist and Canada Gallery)

The strength of Tracing Memory lies in its transgression of aesthetic and, by extension, social and political lines, which are drawn more sharply in these fraught times. While Williams resists the temptation to incorporate figures into her paintings, her works offer no less social commentary than representation could. Rather, the artist, by way of radical material exploration and an anti-virtuosic approach, is continuing the questioning of Western ideals that began with her forebears in the 1960s. Despite sweeping changes in the art world, the show asserts that the dictum still holds true: it's not just what you say; it's how you say it.

Rachel Eulena Williams: Tracing Memory continues at Canada (60 Lispenard Street, Manhattan) through January 23.

Related

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Rachel Eulena Williams's Threads of Abstraction

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Over the past few years, Rachel Eulena Williams has honed a distinctive style of brightly colored, multi-dimensional abstract paintings. The artist reconfigures canvases that she removes from conventional supports, and collages a myriad of diverse materials onto them. While always interesting, recently the works have taken a decided turn for the better.

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Williams uses shapes that are loosely modular, circles, and irregular rectangles that imply maps or schematic drawings for extremely funky space stations. And while the paintings never refer directly to anything in particular William's abstractions do evoke construction sites, clotheslines, or well-loved quilts. The tondos also feel totemistic, like shields or ornaments. The objects exude solidity and groundedness; their drips and flows of paint rarely conform to the laws of gravity. Williams' collage techniques subvert the inherent weight of the paintings: knots and makeshift tassels are wrapped or draped around the tondo's edge; folded or slit fabric reveals a hidden blue or smoldering orange.

It seems possible to say the content of the work is color, which she uses in daring and expressive ways. Williams chooses bold hues that she employs to create wild contrasts and subtle gradients. The complexity of her choices feels transgressive and potent. In a recent interview, Williams pointed out that the story of Black abstraction, including such artists as Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, or Alma Thomas, is the story of color. Color unbound and taking flight, is a reaction to the whiteness typical of gallery walls and grounds of most paintings, countering whiteness in both a literal and metaphorical sense. Tracing Memory places her as a clear heir to that tradition and reminds us that placing one color against another is a choice and her choices here create power. The power of color and Williams' nearly bodily inhabitation of materiality allow traces of memory to flow through these pieces, both as standalone artworks and as collective memory of labor and longing.

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Rachel Eulena Williams: Tracing Memory - Canada Online Viewing Room

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Williams uses shapes that are loosely modular, circles, and irregular rectangles that imply maps or schematic drawings for extremely funky space stations. And while the paintings never refer directly to anything in particular William's abstractions do evoke construction sites, clotheslines, or well-loved quilts. The tondos also feel totemistic, like shields or ornaments.

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Sequin Light (Orange, with Kjerstin Rossi)

2021
Vinyl, textile, spray paint, sequins, plastic, twine, metal snap, metal rivets
237.5 x 226.1 cm / 93 1/2 x 89 in

Tuesday Smillie

Tuesday Smillie (born 1981 in Boston MA; lives and works in New York NY) is a visual artist working with textiles, collage, printmaking and watercolor. At the core of her work is the question of the individual and the group: the binary of inclusion and exclusion, and the porous membrane between the two.

She has had solo exhibitions at the Rose Art Museum, Waltham MA and Participant Inc, New York NY. Her work has been shown at the New Museum, New York NY; Brooklyn Museum, New York NY; Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany; Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil; The Jewish Museum, New York NY, and others.

On View in New York

Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, ' The New Bend ' is on view until 2 Apr 2022.

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2021 Vinyl, textile, spray paint, sequins, plastic, twine, metal snap, metal rivets 237.5 x 226.1 cm / 93 1/2 x 89 in Tuesday Smillie (born 1981 in Boston MA; lives and works in New York NY) is a visual artist working with textiles, collage, printmaking and watercolor.

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Inspired By Protest Signs, Artist Tuesday Smillie Stitches A Transgender Lineage

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Inspired By Protest Signs, Artist Tuesday Smillie Stitches A Transgender Lineage

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Inspired By Protest Signs, Artist Tuesday Smillie Stitches A Transgender Lineage

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Queer and transgender activists from the ’70s have garnered renewed interest as today’s trans and gender nonconforming people -- like Tuesday Smillie -- search for a lineage.

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Sojourner Truth Parsons: Art Practice as Family

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Sojourner Truth Parsons: Art Practice as Family

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When Sojourner Truth Parsons tells me she's "so sincere, very sincere, super sincere, overly sincere," I believe her. Partly because she's Canadian, and partly for the way she handles her dog, Toni, a spritely blonde who lolls feline in her arms, and totally, I believe her, because of her voice. With a slight lisp, Parsons's voice volleys over words; it's sweet, like melon scooped with a spoon tailored to ball the fruit; mother and child, sorrow and hope, conviction and apprehension all wrapped up in it.

In Los Angeles, people talk big. Lie is the law, gossip, gospel. It's a survival strategy, listening for subtext. What's beneath, usually, is desire. People still come to LA to make dreams come true.

Parsons's dreams, while modest by Hollywood standards, are most ambitious. She wants "to be the best artist that I can be." This is to be a lifelong pursuit. "Art is just what I do," she says. Now, at 32, the British Columbia-raised creator, who has Mi'kmaq and African Canadian heritage, is committed: "It's a relationship," Parsons insists. "Better than any love affair! (When it's good.) My art practice is my family. I wonder at what age I'll be when I feel like it's coming from my vagina."

She's patient. As Parsons and I walked, on magic-hour Monday, along LA's dry riverbed (her choice setting, Toni digs it), the artist mused that what professional success she seeks may not land for decades. She projects herself as a woman revered solely in old age.

" Your work is strange, meaningful, and you're feminist,' she says, parroting that status. " You've struggled, now here's your place. That's the kind of success I yearn for."

Like Louise Bourgeois? I ask. " Betty Woodman," she rejoins.

With Ontarian politesse, I suggest that maybe Parsons could expect more-that such late expectations exist for women artists because of capitalist patriarchy, that precedent and ongoing, though crumbling, reality.

Parsons agrees: "You can't let this misogynistic system define your worth." But because she needs to make art ("If I'm not, I feel dead"), Parsons rests in this peace of mindfulness: "You don't have to arrive by anyone else's standards to feel that you are able to be here, doing what you're doing."

Parsons paints daily. Since moving to Los Angeles from Toronto in March 2015, she's on a roll, receiving enough to continue to buy materials and paint. She's shown at Toronto's Cooper Cole, New York's Tomorrow and LA's Phil and Night Galleries.

The works is delicate and hearty, like her voice. On a recent canvas, the hair of the figure is brushed so faint, like water on sunned concrete, it seems on the brink of fading out of sight. In other works, minstrel Mickey Mouses knock knees near Betty Boop-wish full moons who're multiply impaled by fingers and lift their likenesses like dumbbells.

In one of my favourites, money is gunky. American dollars, or Canadian twenties-green bills, in thick acrylics: jaded, forestial, bluesy and phlegmatic-fight for space as a lone grey glove reaches to collect.

It's rare cool-tones work from an artist who paints, usually, hot and dark, "from the heart." A vision, I feel of commercial expectation; as in our conversation, Sojourner parsed truth out of it.

This spotlight article, adapted from the Fall 2016 issue of Canadian Art, has been generously supported by the RBC Emerging Artists Project.

Sojourner Truth Parsons, Another Beautiful Day, 2015. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy Night Gallery, Los Angeles.

Sojourner Truth Parsons, Heartbeats Accelerating, 2016. Acrylic on canvas, 2.13 x 1.52 m. Courtesy Tomorrow Gallery, New York.

Sojourner Truth Parsons, Self Portrait on a Gift Card, 2015. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy Night Gallery, Los Angeles.

Sojourner Truth Parsons, The cool breeze off her back is my facecream, 2016. Collaged canvas and acrylic, 1.82 x 1.52 m. Courtesy Tomorrow Gallery, New York.

Sojourner Truth Parsons, Black and White Bitch Painting a Butterfly, 2016. Acrylic on canvas, 1.52 x 1.21 m. Courtesy Tomorrow Gallery, New York.

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Sojourner Truth Parsons: Art Practice as Family

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When Sojourner Truth Parsons tells me she's "so sincere, very sincere, super sincere, overly sincere," I believe her. Partly because she's Canadian, and partly for the way she handles her dog, Toni, a spritely blonde who lolls feline in her arms, and totally, I believe her, because of her voice.

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Sojourner Truth Parsons in her L.A. studio, 2016.

In an era when identity politics are so prevalent, specifically in the U.S., it's easy to trivialize the travails of our neighbors to the north. Imagine the journey of a Black-Mi'kmaq-Caucasian Canadian painter born to an absentee father and a single mother who enlisted a craft-crazed grandmother to watch her child while she earned a living as a graphic designer for a television station in Victoria, British Columbia.

"My nana was a knitter. She made crazy shit around me all the time, blankets and sweaters and hats with so many colors and patterns, but I felt really strange growing up," says Sojourner Truth Parsons. Her name was picked out by her mother who was visiting a Judy Chicago exhibit in 1984 when baby Sojourner kicked as she was passing a reference to the 19th century abolitionist and activist.

Though she wanted to "be a star" as a child, Truth Parsons' younger sister-now a professional dancer and choreographer-proved the more talented performer. "I would always draw out the things I wanted to be," she explains of her early sketches of legs doing splits or turns. "I just pull from my life. My dad wasn't around much when I was growing up so I had all these watercolors of this black man. It's always been an expression of a personal journey."

After graduating from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and burning through a few Canadian galleries, Truth Parsons' journey ultimately led her to a residency at New Mexico's Santa Fe Art Institute in 2014, where she used sand, acrylic and ceramic to make collaged canvases with warm colors and pink poodles to tackle notions of rejection and shame. That year she also connected with Davida Nemeroff and Mieke Marple, the founders of Los Angeles' Night Gallery, who invited Truth Parsons to show these works in "Hot House," their 2014 pop-up show in Harlem during New York's Frieze Week. A year later, she ducked out to Mexico City "to get away for a bit," but Nemeroff encouraged her to come back to the States and check out L.A. for a few months in order to make a new body of work.

"When I first got here, I was out at the Beverly Hills Hotel and the Chateau Marmont and I was really overwhelmed. I'm sober so I'd just be talking to these beautiful lips, mouths and cigarettes. That's what was coming at me, these glamorous, weird experiences," says Truth Parsons over a kombucha in her new light-and-flower-filled loft studio overlooking Downtown L.A. Evoking the single point perspectives of Matisse interiors, Tom Wesselmann's early Pop Art icons, the sex appeal of Patrick Nagel posters, and the dark beauty of Hollywood glitz, her sand-covered acrylic collages and canvases were an instant hit with collectors and earned Truth Parsons shows this year at New York's Tomorrow Gallery and Night, where she will make her solo debut September 16. While she could easily forge a factory from her recent works, Truth Parsons lives by the Rosemarie Trockel adage: "The minute something works, it ceases to be interesting. As soon as you have spelled something out, you should set it aside."

"I don't think the world needs more objects. You don't need my painting in that way. What I can offer is my feelings and emotions towards the world," she says. "I'm looking at art through my heart. Maybe that's selfish, but I want to find something I didn't know was there."

While this "selfishness" led her to painting scenes of women looking away from the viewer for Tomorrow-reflecting her retreat from the Hollywood fast life into a more domestic existence in Pasadena-Truth Parsons is showing an entirely new body of work at Night about "women, women, women and the sun," she says. "I want to find the painting, I don't want to make it. It's so much about vibes."
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In an era when identity politics are so prevalent, specifically in the U.S., it's easy to trivialize the travails of our neighbors to the north. Imagine the journey of a Black-Mi'kmaq-Caucasian Canadian painter born to an absentee father and a single mother who enlisted a craft-crazed grandmother to watch her child while she earned a living as a graphic designer for a television station in Victoria, British Columbia.

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Sojourner Truth Parsons

Sojourner Truth Parsons's (b. 1984 Vancouver, Canada ; lives and works Brooklyn NY) paintings are personal yet fictional moments, driven by a desire to translate the psychological and the affective into visual form. Bodies, flora and fauna, and the city-the touchstones of daily existence-are anchoring forms in her practice; they are images that stand in for the emotional acuities and atmospheric intensities that occupy her time in the studio.

Solo exhibitions include: 'Milk river,' Various Small Fires, Seoul, South Korea (2020); 'Sex and love with a psychologist,' Foxy Production, New York NY (2020) and 'Holding Your Dog At Night,' Oakville Galleries, Oakville, Canada (2007).

On View in New York

Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, ' The New Bend ' is on view until 2 Apr 2022.

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Sojourner Truth Parsons - Hauser & Wirth

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Sojourner Truth Parsons's (b. 1984 Vancouver, Canada ; lives and works Brooklyn NY) paintings are personal yet fictional moments, driven by a desire to translate the psychological and the affective into visual form.

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Artist Talk: Eric N. Mack in-conversation with Georgina Jackson

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Artist Talk: Eric N. Mack in-conversation with Georgina Jackson

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Artist Talk: Eric N. Mack in-conversation with Georgina Jackson

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Eric N. Mack's work varies from sculpture and installation, to wall pieces and work on paper. His aesthetic involves a particular type of tactility and usage of common items, primarily those related to clothing. Readymade elements, such as garments, blankets, pegboards, magazine pages, and grommets, recompose and transmute via usage...

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By any standard, artist Eric N. Mack is already having a halcyon year: at the time of writing he has a large-scale work - Halter - that winds its way around the exterior of an abandoned Californian gas station at the Coachella Valley art biennial Desert X, a solo exhibition Lemme walk across the room in the Great Hall at the Brooklyn Museum, and two pieces in the group show A Time for New Dreams at London's Serpentine Galleries (curated by his friend and past collaborator, fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner). Moreover, the Whitney is featuring the 32-year-old painter in the 2019 edition of its eponymous biennial. Mack's work forms a private universe where experiments with color, found objects, investigations of memory, and references to Black popular culture, art history, and architecture sit side by side. He challenges everything and somehow makes it all cohere - the moments where dye stains an image of Mary J. Blige torn from a magazine or a moving blanket acts as the ground for a painting are among the instances where he manages to make seemingly disparate things share the same world. First at his studio in New York's Bronx, and afterwards wandering (characteristically) between Chinatown joints like Dimes and Bacaro, we discussed the recent evolution of his practice, formalism, and Lil' Kim.

Artist Eric N. Mack photographed for PIN-UP by Rafik Greiss.

It's worth saying right from the outset that you're a painter, though your work has taken on increasingly ambitious architectural resonances and has always been in dialogue with other mediums - sculpture, fashion design, set design, printmaking. What does it mean to you to maintain that you are a painter? Is it an ethical statement for you or a methodological one?
I remind myself that painting is at first a fluid medium. It's been my task to metabolize its fluidity. My work materializes from a series of questions about painting. What it is, but also what it is not. The nuanced sensibilities in surface, use of light, color, texture, but also acknowledging uses beyond aesthetics. I've felt it important after its many deaths that painting equip itself with the ability to become more complex as it fuses itself to the everyday. I'm interested in adding to the trajectory of that history. Painting demands a perceptiveness, and there's also something performative in talking about painting - it feels like a political distinction discussing how the work identifies. The way I've learned to paint really has to do with resolving antagonisms I have towards the medium. It's almost like a system of beliefs.

It's faith-based in a certain sense.
Absolutely.

It's been incredible to witness the plasticity of your work in the context of your collaborations with Grace Wales Bonner - fashion shows, performances, and retail installations. How did you and Grace meet?
We met at the opening of Making & Unmaking, a group exhibition curated by Duro Olowu at London's Camden Arts Centre in 2016. I'd seen her work on Instagram and at her degree show at Central Saint Martins.

What were some of the affinities you shared with Grace? Were you both working on fabric in similar ways, or was it just kind of a shared poetic sensibility?
I think it was a shared poetic. It's a hard thing to say to a designer that you feel you're their ideal wearer, that you think their work is made for you. I remember telling her that, and then she told me she could see me in Balenciaga. (Laughs.)

Your most recent collaboration at the Serpentine features two of your works. One of them, A Lesson in Perspective (2017), was previously shown in the U.K. at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, where it was installed in such a way that it literally consumed the space - it almost dematerialized the architecture, and you had a performer performing in and around the work. At the Serpentine, the context is completely different - the piece is part of a group exhibition and a Wales Bonner runway show. What are your thoughts about your paintings and the various ways they're sited?
I like the challenge of A Lesson in Perspective being placed in a historical box. Stretching out, bracing the space, but also negotiating its own space between the walls, creating its own kind of traffic. I was able to achieve a degree of constriction with that piece, so it was a game of angles. The cutout in the pieces ends up being this kind of active frame through which you could see the rest of the room. That piece was totally about the invention of perspective, and the orthographic lines end up actually being physical ropes that extend the work out to the periphery.

Yes, very similar to those Renaissance machines for drawing how, say, Brunelleschi or Dürer would use those sorts of strings to actually produce the parallel lines that disappear into the vanishing point. But you put very different objects in the vanishing point - it's not a basilica in the distance, it's a performer's body or a David Hammons Exactly. And I'm also thinking about relation and exchange, about communication and distancing points. I think about color in that way too. I think about proximity - the distance between a faint pink color to a saturated magenta. A fiery magenta being very, very frontal versus a beige being so distant as to seem to fade into the walls. I think about intensity, heat, being physical - conditions of light that are painting games materialized in tangible forms.

One of the more fascinating things your work does is to make the viewer aware of the strangeness of museum architecture. Your show in the Great Hall at the Brooklyn Museum certainly does this - it makes you notice the entrance and the exits, the things you can drill into and fasten to, the quality of light and how it affects the colors in the work. Sometimes your work completely reshapes our experience of the space - it's like you're in the work and not in the Great Hall anymore.
In one of the pieces in that show, Seat Pleasant (2019), the fabric kind of sits in between pillars in a way that I imagine a newspaper before it's cut - how it would sit in between the rollers of the press, almost affirming the flatness of the fabric. And the length of the fabric would allow for it to have the flatness of painting in certain places, but also embrace the room in others. I used to think of these works as abstract paintings in which landscape is reduced to a single line, but also where the line acts as a horizon line, the mark of a day, the trace of the body. Then again it can just be decorative or aesthetic.

What role do objects play in these pieces? I understand the ways in which you're able to explore line through cording, through long stretches of fabric, through streaks of dye and paint, or gesture, but what about the literal objects that are part of the piece - like the ladder and the fencing in The pedestal is the opposite of the grave (2017)?
Well, the ladder is always potential, a potential use because there's not much about the sculpture itself that keeps it from being used. But it also ends up being a pedestal that the sculpture is constructed on. And the piece of fencing is all about rupture and flourish and closing the grid, balling the grid up in your hands - creating something decadent and complex and draping the grid on top of it. And then the bed skirt in the piece is made with flounces, and it has a tag from the secondhand shop I bought it from in Florida. And then the cowboy hat, the aluminum pole, the skewers, with the mangled fence... that would just be about styling. About Buffalo style.

So what you're describing isn't really assemblage, per se, it's styling, trying to find a way for seemingly disparate elements to cohere. How do we put these two colors together? How do we match this piece of fence to this other element that's totally unlike it?
How do we make contradictions that are also harmonies? Unlikely harmonies through contradiction.

Moving from indoors to outdoors, when was the first time you made work outside?
I've done summer shows outdoors where the work withstands the rain and dirt at someone's house or something like that. But I think at the Yale Norfolk School of Art I made most of the work outside. Pouring resin outdoors, and the resin falls off the canvas into the dirt. One of the pieces that I made out there involved dyeing a canvas remnant - I painted on it, bleached it, just did everything to this piece. It looked like Frankenstein's monster! But I was trying to find the perfect structure for it. And the perfect structure that I found was actually mixing resin and pouring it on one side of it so that the piece would stiffen. It was almost an L-shape. It kind of curled and shifted in form and was stiff. But it was not stiff flat. It ended up being this live shell. The edges remained frayed.

Eric N. Mack installing at the Brooklyn Museum.

You have an incredible piece, Halter, up at Desert X, in which you use vintage Missoni fabrics to wrap an old gas station that sits at the edge of the Salton Sea in Coachella Valley. Working outdoors at such a large scale, how did you think about the work and its relationship to the landscape?
There were different challenges, elemental changes. I will say that I was conscious of dehydration, the wind, etc., the typical things you associate with being in the desert. But the fact is that people live there and have lived there for generations. It's a cultural space, not an empty landscape; it has its own histories and human traces. We installed not far from Slab City and monuments such as Salvation Mountain. Culture persists even where it's harder for people to live. The work marks the landscape in a certain way, acknowledges a human presence there, a human mark.

Artist Eric N. Mack photographed for PIN-UP by Rafik Greiss.

Definitely. As opposed to a lot of the discourse around land art that has traditionally been predicated upon erasure, the language around the "virgin earth," and those aerial photographs of emptied landscapes.
I mean the site was pre-existing. I was thinking about abandonment, gentrification, things awaiting transformation, being primed to be taken over. I was thinking about a biennial that would serve developers and corporations and for that to suddenly serve as a site for artists to intervene, highlight, or acknowledge certain complexities of architectural space, even mundane architectural space. I wondered how a piece like Halter would relate to vernacular architecture, how it uses the language that was there before and brings it into contemporary space through a hybridization.

This makes me think of your show Misa Hylton-Brim (2018) at London's Simon Lee Gallery and the pieces with the moving blankets, or how you hang carpets or fabrics as walls for warmth. When I first encountered your work at the Studio Museum in Harlem, you were already dealing with issues of shelter - you had enclosures and pieces that one could walk through. It made me think, "What sort of person or thing would occupy this structure?" So much of your work implies a body, whether it's a question of enclosure or it's a question of - you could really wear this shit. What role does the body of the viewer play for you in the work?
I guess I'm thinking about a feeling - something sort of like a romantic longing, or a gesture of collectivity, trying to make something that would be felt and empathized with on some base level. Often it has to do with understanding how something feels to the touch by the way it looks. So there's this eye-hand thing, a visual touch. That's why the palm ends up being so important to me as a spatial gesture. I constantly think about these spaces and how they impact the viewer - something like being enveloped, being wrapped, being housed. An experience similar to wearing something. Those kinds of slippages are always really interesting to me - the difference between a windbreaker and a nylon Coleman tent. But it's not just about a specific body, it's also about a collective body or a larger understanding of what it means to be wrapped or protected, and also to be vulnerable and exposed to some degree.

Sometimes it's a single, unexpected item that lets you really feel the scale of the work. At the Brooklyn Museum show, for me, it's the shirt on the hanger, because I look at the shirt and say, "I could fit into that shirt." I feel in comparison how extremely big and enveloping the rest of the work is, but because there is one particular item that is my size, so to speak, my body is implicated in the piece, right?
Yes, there's something about the measurement of the hand or the turning radius of the body as in a Rothko that allows it to be truly sublime and monumental. You feel the scale. The artist Byron Kim said he started out making paintings of his arms and that that had been a gesture of early New York School painting - that secretly it was all about the body, about a kind of choreography.

Can we talk about Lil' Kim? She's such a critical source of inspiration for your work.
Oh my gosh, I mean, Lil' Kim for me is the beginning of an archetype of hyper-femme in rap music, but also, she's a contradiction. I've come to see her as a fragile icon over time, but I want to make a distinction between what I thought was fragility and vulnerability. She exemplifies the archetype of the female rapper, she's an inventor of how we see them. She's nasty but in the best ways. She's in control. She's sex-positive. I remember seeing this episode she was hosting in front of Bergdorf's, and when she goes in, you can tell she's so excited! As if she'd never been on TV before, ever. And she's talking to Biggie in between reading the teleprompter, and she's all like, "I know, Big, I'm playin' myself, but, you know. I'ma go in there and look at some diamonds - all about that bling bling bling, you know?" (Laughs.) It's just so honest. Her early naïveté was just pure earnestness and she was ready to be a representative of fashion before fashion was able to accept her as a representative of it. On the subject of naïveté, I'm obsessed with something (designer) Andre Walker said during a lecture he gave at the Fashion Institute of Technology. He was talking about growing up, and remembering reading his mom's W Magazine and seeing a Chloé ad with this beautiful woman in the picture and being like, "Oh, Chloé must be her name," but then realizing months later that it's a different woman every time. This is going to be the title of one of my works - I have to use this in some way in the future! "Chloé is just the name of the girl in the photograph."

To what extent do you return to that time period - the late 90s and early 2000s when you were a teenager - in your work now? Your Simon Lee show was even named after (the stylist) Misa Hylton-Brim, who worked a lot with Lil' Kim back then.
The thing is, Misa Hylton-Brim was the behind-the-scenes labor who made these looks, and Lil' Kim was the perfect conduit for them. She says the things that she says, she expresses herself through the clothes - it's all seamless. I'm also interested in the meaning of these Italian family fashion houses at that time, what they symbolized and then seeing this Black girl from Brooklyn wear these things in such a luxe way. The sequins, the furs. In light of all these recent blackface incidents, like with Gucci and Prada, I've been thinking that what it communicates to us, to African-American wearers, is that we weren't anticipated. That maybe we were never anticipated. You think about Lil' Kim's presence when she started wearing Chanel bodysuits and Versace - this was about her embodying the brand and making it her own. But there are racist and classist distinctions that keep these worlds from making contact with one another. It's taken Tommy Hilfiger so long to realize they need to bring back their 90s clothing to actually be a presence again.

Eric N. Mack: Lemme walk across the room (2019) at the Brooklyn Museum until August 4.

I think some of the surfaces of your work negotiate these kinds of conversations in very nuanced ways. I remember going to the Kunsthalle Basel in 2017 and seeing your installation (2016) with its principal formal gesture of placing an image of Prince at its compositional center. That felt very radical.
That image of Prince for me was an affirmation in a way - the fact that it was a Mapplethorpe photograph, the fact that it was a teenage Prince, negotiated on a tartan plaid, a swatch of fabric. These are the outliers I'm trying to mine.

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INTERVIEW: Eric N. Mack, the New York Artist Who Paints with Textiles

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By any standard, artist Eric N. Mack is already having a halcyon year: at the time of writing he has a large-scale work - Halter - that winds its way around the exterior of an abandoned Californian gas station at the Coachella Valley art biennial Desert X, a solo exhibition Lemme walk across the room in the Great Hall at the Brooklyn Museum, and two pieces in the group show A Time for New Dreams at London's Serpentine Galleries (curated by his friend and past collaborator, fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner).

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Forward walking boy on the edge where the sand meets the shore (from DES HOMMES ET DES DIEUX)

2018
Silk organza, cotton handkerchief and tulle
257 x 470 x 303 cm / 101 1/8 x 185 x 119 1/4 in

Eric N. Mack

Eric N. Mack (b. 1987, Columbia MD; lives and works in New York NY) refers to himself as a painter, yet his works rarely observe the medium's traditional canvas-to-stretcher format. His use of color, form and material as elements in a compositional lexicon situate the origin of his practice in the investigation of painting in an expanded field, using stained or dyed fabrics as his principal medium.

In April 2021, Mack was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy in Rome, Italy. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale FL (2021); Scrap Metal Gallery, Toronto, Canada (2019); The Power Station, Dallas TX (2019); Brooklyn Museum, New York NY (2019); and Simon Lee Gallery, London, UK (2018).

On View in New York

Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, ' The New Bend ' is on view until 2 Apr 2022.

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2018 Silk organza, cotton handkerchief and tulle 257 x 470 x 303 cm / 101 1/8 x 185 x 119 1/4 in Eric N. Mack (b. 1987, Columbia MD; lives and works in New York NY) refers to himself as a painter, yet his works rarely observe the medium's traditional canvas-to-stretcher format.

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This interview was first published in Issue 06

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Valeria Biamonti: The term 'painting' has always been quite close to your practice, and to how it is interpreted. How do you experience the relationship between your work and painting?

Eric N. Mack: I think the work comes from citing problems that come from painting. Questions in regards to depth and materiality, proximity. The physical intimacy of a viewer. Also, issues like that of abstraction-whether a painting can really hold emotional meaning for the viewer... I began with Belgian linen, cotton, standard kinds of material surfaces to paint on, transform further by switching these conventional surfaces out, and find those surrogates that connect with life differently. I felt like the most engaging manner I could deal with surface, and all of these questions had to do with the sculptural dimension.

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VB: In the last decades, there has certainly been a shift in how the medium of painting can be understood and experimented with, expanding the field beyond the confines of the canvas. How would you like your practice to contribute towards new possibilities in painting? How do you relate to painting's past?

EM: I have always connected to my sense of history and precedent. I think of the Blinky Palermo cloth pictures as a poignant moment for me, which brought up important questions. 'Is this a readymade? Is this an abstraction? Is this a landscape?' Particularly, 'How is this an object-beyond just a simple picture?' I connect with attitude through gesture. I imagine an object's presence in a specific space and how this presence changes the space's overall dynamic and understanding.

VB: Found images and objects play a fundamental part in the poetics of your practice. I find fascinating the way you bring objects together, objects that have previous histories and that suddenly become something else.

EM: I am a formalist. A lot of my connection to the work has to do with visual phenomena, the composition, or the attempt at finding form. There are ways in which I feel challenged by form. When, for example, I see whether it can contort itself into something else. You know, by the simple means of cutting, folding, re-stitching... Towards the end of the process, the lasting meaning shifts come.

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VB: Do you conceive the viewer's engagement with your work early in the process? Do you have specific expectations of the viewer?

EM: I think a lot about the viewer. I think the viewer isn't very different from me. I feel like there's... a want for complexity. I want something to be able to appeal to anyone but at the same time to be able to speak its own language. Sometimes, when things speak so distinctly, there isn't any exclusion. I like contradiction in a work. There are many different approaches, which opens up the conversation. There are so many expectations when the art viewer comes into the gallery or museum. I like reducing those components to more simple forms, more bodily forms, allowing there to be a kind of reward in examining the artwork. You know, you look closer, and you see something else. From afar, you may not get it completely: When the question about the work's nature is meant to be asked.

VB: How important are the titles of your works?

EM: It's its own process, I think. There are times when language comes into play really specifically. I like to use jargon, a word that pertains to specific kinds of labor, or subdivisions, regional slang, using dialect, which presents opportunities to give voice and emotion to art objects. Sometimes the work is made of readymade materials and surfaces, and often the titles end up being readymade. They come from lines of songs, or the name of local businesses that I walk past every day, a friend's baby... They can all be fair game and talk about life.

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VB: Do you feel like your work is autobiographical?

EM: It is unavoidable. The compelling thing is empathy involved in the process of abstraction.

VB: I can personally sense a performative element in your work. Not in the sense that the work itself is performance. It's more the visibility of the process in the finished piece, the installation of the work, its relationship to architecture, which are performative...

EM: I like that the moving blankets have a kind of installation element. Their thickness and materiality... They were almost able to contain walls-that the fabric could be attached to the gallery walls would allow the space to be affected in several ways. The gallery could become more insolated by each work installed. Many of those blankets buffer sound in music studios. Outside their use as a protective blanket for art objects and furniture, there are other uses that I am interested in that the viewer happens upon. A lot of the performance I am interested in is a bit invisible. It is evident through the gestures of placement, the use of space, anticipation, and rhythm. Allowing the fabric to drape in a precise way... Having to reach to the ceiling and also to reach low, near the ground... Space is then able to be activated by the placement of works. I think that kind of physical stretch is essential.

VB: How much does the installation process of the work influence its final form? How do you prepare a show?

EM: It depends on the works. I think about focal points beforehand. What you see as you enter into the room, and what is the last thing you see. It ends up being like a vignette, several vignettes.

VB: Untreated fabric can be a difficult material to work with. Unlike the traditional primed canvas, the artist is not in complete control when it comes to fabrics' undisciplined, 'floating' character. Do you see this as a challenge or as an opportunity to let chance seep into the work?

EM: Both things have to happen. I usually have works that have to be attached to the wall precisely, and other artworks that would be moved around many times, which are a lot more about a degree of improvisation. But I work with image. Again, I work thinking about the lasting image of a work-the way something drapes, for example. I measure the width of the draping, and I make sure that it can be replicated. Still, there is a degree of improvisation that I think is very important for a work to feel like it can live in the space.

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VB: What about more site-specific works, like Halter, the Missoni commission for the outdoor biennial Desert X?

EM: I made many drafts for that piece. I had never done anything at that scale. A lot of my process has to do with accumulated lessons, formal lessons. The way that something could be distributed, for example. Or an understanding, which came from previous work experience, of the way that fabric acts in mass. I wanted to restage prior work with entirely different fabrics, scaled up. It was vital for me to have this concrete proposal of what was going to happen. In this case, there was less room for improvisation. I am grateful we were able to use Missoni fabrics; it came from a recent archive. I was honored to be able to work with this legendary brand. The quality of the textile was outstanding-how durable and flexible. One of the main stipulations was that the fabric should be translucent. The knit was perfect for that. So it was not opaque, but rather a kind of screen to look through.

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VB: Where do you normally source the fabric you use?

EM: My goto place in New York is Mood Fabrics, a famous fabric store from Project Runway. But when I travel, I generally go to local fabric shops. In Milan, for example, it was amazing. They have scrap piles of fabric, and you weigh it. It was perfect for me since I use fabric reminisces more than anything. I usually only need one or two yards to create. I also go to the Salvation Army, vintage shops... I'm getting better at eBay, so I'm doing more of that, but it is still difficult since you can't touch the fabric, and you can only rely on the picture.

VB: What's your view on sustainability of the textile industry?

EM: It is an important topic, especially in fashion, because there is so much overproduction and waste. I think it is crucial that is has become more of a focal point in the industry. Like, you have significant brands that allow that to be central, their pitch for the season. It is entirely reflective of issues like climate change. And also on a more humanitarian level, with regards to factories and labor, allowing people, the workers to have a voice.

VB: Do you think the way you work can say something about it? Could it potentially bring awareness?

EM: I think the way that I work ends up being a model for other forms of making. The fact that the work still holds elegance and mystery and the fact that it can communicate with space. I feel like I see a lot of those references in the fashion industry. You know, looking at the patchwork quilt as a model, which ends up being revisited by many brands... It has a direct correlation to sustainability. Also thinking about the quilters from the American South, women that worked in factories that produced denim jeans and corduroy, who then could do with the reminisce of the fabrics and ended up making beautiful quilts from them. There's even an opportunity to go beyond sustainability-a kind of a new life, what is going to happen after the regeneration.

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An Interview with Eric N. Mack by Valeria Biamonti is published in Issue 06

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This interview was first published in Issue 06 ‍ Valeria Biamonti: The term 'painting' has always been quite close to your practice, and to how it is interpreted. How do you experience the relationship between your work and painting? Eric N. Mack: I think the work comes from citing problems that come from painting.

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Basil Kincaid: River, Frog, and Crescent Moon
September 7 - October 8, 2022
Opening: Wednesday, September 7th, 6:00 - 8:00 pm

Venus Over Manhattan
120 East 65th Street
New York, NY 10065

(New York, NY) - Celebrating improvisation, freedom of imagination, and a continuous process of self-discovery through making, St. Louis, Missouri, and Accra-based is a post-disciplinary artist known for textile compositions that mine what he calls a "spiritual inheritance." On September 7, 2022, will present , the artist's first New York solo exhibition, featuring a series of recent quilted, embroidered, and sculpted works. Kincaid's pieces are often made from "emotionally charged materials," including the cast-off clothes of loved ones, and involve a time-intensive collage technique that channels the inheritance of a multi-generational familial practice of quilting.

Basil Kincaid: River, Frog and Crescent Moon will be on view through October 8th at the gallery's Upper East Side location.

Basil Kincaid's work-be it explored through quilting, photography, collage, installation, or performance-often incorporates found, salvaged, or donated materials. Through reworking and recontextualizing these raw elements, Kincaid offers alternative perspectives from which to consider how context and conditioning impact our identities and self-expression. Kincaid's practice reckons with notions of Black displacement and the strictures and implications of an oppressive, violent and carceral state on Black people, while concurrently deriving a numinous and metaphysical expansiveness from the ancestral wellspring of knowledge, resilience, and joy that the artist's work is equally steeped in.

Salient in this body of work is a concept of connection or communion to one's ancestors and forebears. Investigating the "comforting hands" of ancestry and the infinitude of this lineal knowledge, hands appear visually and metaphorically throughout Kincaid's quilts and embroideries, acting at turns acting as symbols for a shared spirt and cosmic interconnectedness while also evoking the labor and love, both physical and emotional, of ones predecessors. As the artist writes:

"Ultimately...the goal is to get back to nature and nurture...that expansive yet rooted feeling of wholeness and belonging. Where all things are, and are meant to be, shared."

Through rejecting fixity or preconceptions of the work, and instead allowing feeling and intuition to act as guide, Kincaid creates room for spiritual manifestations and expressions that lay beyond the confines of consciousness. Both in process and output Kincaid is committed to self-reclamation and creating spaces of healing. Demonstrating the essentiality of hereditary legacy inherit to both individual identity and communal liberation, Kincaid's work occupies the space that both holds one in tradition and simultaneously encourages and imagines personal freedom and infinitude.

Basil Kincaid (b. 1986, St. Louis, MO) is a post-disciplinary artist, who lives and works between St. Louis, Missouri, and Accra, Ghana. Through quilting, collage, photography, installation, and performance, Kincaid explores questions of identity while simultaneously foregrounding an improvisational and community-oriented approach to making that encourages liberation, healing and meditating on universal interconnectivity. Kincaid received a BA in Studio Art from Colorado College in 2010. Kincaid has been the subject of numerous solo presentations, including recent exhibitions at Leyendecker Gallery, Tenerife; Carl Kostyal, London; and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis. Kincaid's work frequently features in major group exhibitions around the world, including recent shows at Hauser & Wirth, New York; Breeder Gallery, Athens; Stems Gallery, Brussels, and Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco. In 2019, Kincaid debuted a performance called "The Release" at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. In 2021, Kincaid became a United States Artist Fellow. Kincaid's work is held in the permanent collections of the Espacio Tacuari, Buenos Aires; the Illinois State Mueum, Springfield; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

For further information about the exhibition and availability, please contact the gallery atinfo@venusovermanhattan.com

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Basil Kincaid: River, Frog and Crescent Moon - 120 East 65th Street - Exhibitions - Venus Over Manhattan

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Founded in 2012 by Adam Lindemann, Venus Over Manhattan is dedicated to curated exhibitions both historic and contemporary, which cast a unique and often iconoclastic view on the work of established artists or artists whose works have been somewhat overlooked.

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He draws, paints, collages and takes photographs to process ideas that lead to the development of his larger bodies of work. He addresses concepts of identity, place, race and environmentalism. He also focuses on issues facing the poor and people of colour. The goal of his work is to open dialogue which in turn aids community development. Basil works with a variety of media depending on the issues that he chooses to address. Basil Kincaid is inspired by the lost, the forgotten and the beauty in decay.

He gathers discarded pieces of wood, old bricks, pieces of slate and other items deemed no longer useful. He also makes his own paints from natural material like, brick, slate, limestone and various dried flowers. Basil transforms junked wood into canvases. He applies images composed from photographs he takes around the city. He blends dust from finely ground bricks, slate and Missouri limestone into polyurethane that he paints onto the wood

His work was exhibited at Nubuke Foundation between 5 March and 26 April, 2015 to mark Ghana's 58 independence anniversary. His work was dubbed Coloring the Colored: Media Manipulations of Blackness. He examined role the media plays in the way we conceptualize ourselves. He appropriated images from cartoons and movies, juxtaposing imagery from the past with contemporary imagery to examine the ways in which imagery used in the past to coach racist sentiments is rebooted to perpetuate the process of learned inferiority by blacks and to reinforce concepts of white supremacy within whites. The work focused on imagery from media within the United States. Several of these works were pulled from scenes in the movie Farewell Uncle Tom, touted as one of the most brutally realistic depictions of what chattel slavery in the United States would have looked like.

One of his works, "Come this Way", shows a young girl pulling her slave along by the neck playfully. During chattel slavery children that were too young to work were given to white children as play things. This served a multifaceted purpose, most notably it teaches the white children that they are superior to the blacks and it teaches the blacks that from birth until the day they die they will be inferior to whites. The lives of many Black people have been taken as a result of a multifaceted system of racism that operates on a global level and is reinforced by the media.

Basil was selected to receive the ACI Artist-in-Residency for 2014-2015, which will support the vision and execution for his proposal, Reclamation Ghana. This project is an extension of the work he started in St. Louis.

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He draws, paints, collages and takes photographs to process ideas that lead to the development of his larger bodies of work. He addresses concepts of identity, place, race and environmentalism. He also focuses on issues facing the poor and people of colour. The goal of his work is to open...

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2021
Quilt: Ghanaian Wax Block Fabrics, Cotton Warp Cotton Weft Hand woven Ashanti Kente, lace, abrokeyere, embroidery, on wall
264.2 x 152.4 x 2.5 cm / 104 x 60 x 1 in

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I am a Vessel, a Vivid Dreamer, and a World Builder. My work is guided by my connection to ancestral courage and related insights, filtered through observation and expanded by imagination.

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I am a Vessel, a Vivid Dreamer, and a World Builder. My work is guided by my connection to ancestral courage and related insights, filtered through observation and expanded by imagination.

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"I am a Vessel, a Vivid Dreamer, and a World Builder. My work is guided by my connection to ancestral courage and related insights, filtered through observation and expanded by imagination."

"My quest is to understand the tapestry of my own personal and cultural identity within the African Diaspora, contextualized by the scaffolding of my American experience. I practice self exploration, historical investigation, and critical social questioning to cultivate healing towards a remedy for Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. My goal is to co-create sites that stimulate the ancestral memory of love as freedom within us, activating space to participate in shared liberation on local and global scales.

I choose to do so through writing, quilting, collaging, making installations, photographing, performing, and inventing games. Within each of these mediums I promote empathy, curiosity, and critical thought by relocating our attention to new positions so we can see and engage differently. By hanging quilts on the wall, for example, and extracting their utility, I'm able to manipulate their value and the ways they're read; by employing negative space within my collages, I examine how we can uproot ourselves from contexts or societal readings that do not serve us. In all of my work, I hone in on how place shapes perspective, the notion of belonging, and the way we self-perceive.

My work is primarily comprised of found or donated materials that bear great emotional significance to those who once enjoyed them. I often source fabric through social media, where people experience physical and personal disconnection from self, all the while observing how waste is reflective of lived experience. It's this lived experience that I'm most interested in capturing, which is reflected in my interest in quilting.

Quilting as a practice is saturated on both sides of my family, dating back over 7 generations. This family tradition, among others, has provided a compass towards self-reclamation in the face of contemporary expectations. Quilting, within the black cultural tradition, has always served as a revolutionary space of joy, courage, and community in direct contrast to social and financial subjugation. It's a way to honor my predecessors while addressing the questions and concerns of where I am - we are - today. It's a way towards restoring and reconstructing with the resourcefulness born within us."

- Basil Kincaid, 2021

About Basil Kincaid

Basil Kincaid (b. 1986, St. Louis, Missouri) is a post-disciplinary artist who explores the fixity of conditioned and self-imposed constructs. Through quilting, collaging, photography, installation and performance-done with found, salvaged and donated materials-Kincaid interrogates social mores while drafting alternative cultural fabrics. With an improvisational and community-oriented approach, resourcefulness and freedom of imagination emerge as critical components in the liberation of spirit. Kincaid studied drawing and painting at Colorado College, graduating in 2010. He has exhibited works with Kavi Gupta Gallery, Mindy Solomon, Kravets Wehby, and Carl Kostyal. Kincaid is part of the JP Morgan permanent art collection and recently debuted their first museum performance, "The Release," at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St.Louis MO. Kincaid is also a 2021 recipient of the United States Artists Fellowship. Kincaid opened a solo show with Galería Leyendecker January. Up next, Milan, where Basil will debut a new body of works with Galleria Poggiali.

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"I am a Vessel, a Vivid Dreamer, and a World Builder. My work is guided by my connection to ancestral courage and related insights, filtered through observation and expanded by imagination." "My quest is to understand the tapestry of my own personal and cultural identity within the African Diaspora, contextualized by the scaffolding of my American experience.

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Basil Kincaid (b. 1986, St. Louis) is a postdisciplinary artist who constructs, contemplates, and revises self-imposed and conditioned limitations and explores their fixity. Through quilting, collaging, photography, installation, and performance-done with found, salvaged, and donated materials-Kincaid discards social mores while drafting alternative cultural fabrics.

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Made in His Accra Studio, Basil Kincaid’s Quilts Tie Together Histories of Black Quilters, Including His Own Family

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Made in His Accra Studio, Basil Kincaid’s Quilts Tie Together Histories of Black Quilters, Including His Own Family

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Artist and quilter Basil Kincaid has been aiming high-not only with his recent habit of jumping as a form of bodily training, but also with the ambition of his mixed-media quilted works currently making their New York debut at the artist's solo exhibition " River, Frog and Crescent Moon " at Venus Over Manhattan. All seven large-scale quilts at the Upper East Side gallery feature densely woven surfaces, rich with narratives that combine the subliminal with the everyday. Contorted bodies with large phalluses stretch over fluid dreamscapes; geometric patterns provide hallucinatory backdrops. Overall, bright hues-mainly from textiles that Kincaid collects from his loved ones-remain persistent.

Basil Kincaid in his studio. Photography courtesy the artist and Venus Over Manhattan, New York.

"Part of the mythology in the work takes daily elements in life and attribute further meaning," he says. "It could be seen simply as jumping or a metaphor for taking a leap of faith or reaching a new height." The leaping figure in the show's only vertical quilt, The Frog (2022), is autobiographical, capturing both his recent hobby and the bounds his studio practice has made. This year alone, the 36-year-old has been featured in group shows at Kunsthalle Krems in Austria, Smithsonian American Art Museum in D.C., Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, and curator Legacy Russell's traveling Hauser & Wirth exhibition, "The New Bend," and another solo exhibition in Miami with Mindy Solomon Gallery.

Melanin Activation: Sun Harvest, 2020-2022, Basil Kincaid. Photography courtesy the artist and Venus Over Manhattan, New York.

Moving to Accra in 2014 on an Arts Connect International residency as a painter was a turning point for Kincaid's life and career. After years of working as a middle school art teacher, he had felt the urge for a new chapter in his own practice-and the residency allowed him to pick an international destination for a nine-month sojourn. Kincaid chose Ghana to see the dungeons built for enslaved people on the coast during slave trade. There, he started quilting for the first time, "because I felt close to my family history," he says. "After a Western canon-focused education at school, I wanted to know what my lineage was producing." Using his "muscle memory" of bending over the paper to draw as a 10-year-old kid came in handy to scout and weave horizontally on the floor. Now, the artist's work marries Ghana's local fiber traditions, such as kente cloth, with traditional Black American techniques, "to look at their relationships through the materials and the act of weaving," he explains.

Praise around the Seed, 2022, Basil Kincaid. Photography courtesy the artist and Venus Over Manhattan, New York.

Hailing from a family with a long history in quilting, Kincaid remembers watching his grandmother and her friends do the needlework at his grandparents' farm in Arkansas with "a distanced curiosity." Today, the spiritual element of his practice comes in heavy "because I can feel her energy with me." Revisiting familial lineage has also granted Kincaid fresh eyes to look at art history. His grandmother's intuitive quilts, similar to the southern tradition of Gee's Bend, serve as inspiration. "Those patterns she created are the height of abstraction, but no one regarded them that way," Kincaid says. His own work vows to give quilting the art lineage it deserves.

The Frog, 2022, Basil Kincaid. Photography courtesy the artist and Venus Over Manhattan.

While quilting at his Accra studio where all the works in his new show come from, the act is bigger than him, a meditation that weaves the efforts of generations of celebrated or forgotten Black quilters. Sewing together emotionally-charged fabrics with intuition is critical for letting his subconsciousness lead the way. "If I had to filter my ideas through my cognitive mind, who knows if I would have started quilting," Kincaid admits.
"River, Frog and Crescent Moon" on view at Venus Over Manhattan until October 8, 2022, at 120 East 65th Street, New York, New York 10065. Sign Up for the Cultured Newsletter
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Made in His Accra Studio, Basil Kincaid's Quilts Tie Together Histories of Black Quilters, Including His Own Family

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Artist and quilter Basil Kincaid has been aiming high-not only with his recent habit of jumping as a form of bodily training, but also with the ambition of his mixed-media quilted works currently making their New York debut at the artist's solo exhibition " River, Frog and Crescent Moon " at Venus Over Manhattan.

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Basil Kincaid Exhibitions: Realms of Refuge , Kavi Gupta | 219 N. Elizabeth St. Chicago, IL 60607, 10 Jul - 30 Oct 2021; Parallel Lives , Kavi Gupta | 835 W. Washington St. Chicago, IL, 60607, 16 Jun - 24 Aug 2018

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b. 1980

Tomashi Jackson is an African American abstract painter and printmaker who connects histories and archives in her abstract paintings that are inspired by court rulings. She uses photography to tell the stories of the dispossession and displacement of Black people and others in the United States. Her search is for a visual language in art to convey law and policy. "I have a compulsion to address issues of public concern." Her rigorous social commentary and themes of social practice are embedded in her work.

Raised in Los Angeles, Jackson was a Bay Area muralist before attending Cooper Union where she received her B.F.A. and the Yale School of Art where she received her M.F.A. In between attending Cooper Union and Yale she did a design-oriented master's degree at the M.I.T. School of Architecture and Planning that led her to policy classes at Harvard University, which helped her understand why generations of women in her family were domestics. She also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Jackson's paintings are three-dimensional assemblages that begin with archival or contemporary photographs. To these photo transfers, she adds layers of paper, textiles, embroidery, and prints to tell the narrative of the segregation and displacement of communities of Black, Indigenous, and people of color in the United States. This displacement continues to the present day seizures and foreclosures of homes, owned by Black and Brown people, under the Third Party Transfer (TPT) Program. This Program targets paid-for properties in gentrifying communities, transferring ownership from elderly Black and Brown property owners to developers.

In the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Jackson showed three works that told the stories of African Americans who in the mid-19th century lost their fully paid-for homes in New York City when the Black middle-class community of Seneca Village was razed for the construction of Central Park.

In 2021, Jackson had an exhibition "The Land Claim" at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York. This show told of the oppression of Indigenous, Black, and Latino community members living on the East End of Long Island. In the same year she also had a solo exhibition at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Jackson has taught at Cooper Union, New York University, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Rhode Island School of Design, as well as other schools.

Her works are in the permanent collections of museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Pizzuti Collection.

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b. 1980 Tomashi Jackson is an African American abstract painter and printmaker who connects histories and archives in her abstract paintings that are inspired by court rulings. She uses photography to tell the stories of the dispossession and displacement of Black people and others in the United States.

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AS A GRADUATE STUDENT at Yale University in the mid-2010s, Tomashi Jackson had a striking realization: The essentialist language of Josef Albers's pioneering instructional text Interaction of Color (1963) closely mirrored the rhetoric of the segregation policies fought by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in civil-rights court cases. The Houston-born artist has in turn developed her own language of abstract painting, one as rigorous in its inquiries into shape and hue as it is in uncovering legacies of systemic racism in the United States. Visitors to the 2019 Whitney Biennial may recall her contribution: dense architectural surfaces, hewn from found materials, that reveal histories of housing displacement and gentrification in New York by revisiting the largely untold story of Seneca Village, a free Black ninenteenth-century community that was razed by Irish and German immigrants to make way for present-day Central Park. Repeatedly, Jackson's work visualizes how so-called progress is inextricably linked to violent systems of exclusion.

During a residency in the fall of 2019 in Athens, Jackson became preoccupied with the origins of democracy, a subject she will confront head-on in "Love Rollercoaster," an exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. The show, timed to coincide with the US presidential election this November, borrows its title from a 1975 song by legendary funk group the Ohio Players, and together, the five paintings that will be on view cannily evoke the brutal spectacle and tumult of American politics. The three incomplete works shown here each began with a photograph of Black voters queuing outside a Baptist church in 1948 that Jackson discovered in the online archives of the Library of Congress. Using a projector, Jackson painted this image in diagonal hatches onto supports composed of voter-registration applications, various voting pamphlets and flyers, Pentelic marble dust collected in Athens, and soil gathered from the Lucy Depp Park in Powell, Ohio-a site along the Underground Railroad. If these multitextured layerings model the preservation of collective memory, they also serve as metaphors for enduring suppression. Today, 155 years after Juneteenth, barriers such as felony disenfranchisement, discriminatory voter-ID laws, and the racial gap in voting wait times stand as monuments to the unfreedom on which the United States was founded.

Galvanized by the heartbreak of generational trauma and decades of prolonged crisis, Jackson sees her work as a mode of healing, a means to salvage the ruptured records of the past in order to better understand our present. Although the following pages are, in a sense, fleeting-each contains a work in progress-their reparative grace reminds us that the urgency of now is part of a historical continuum, a seemingly never-ending ride of sharp turns, slow climbs, and dizzying drops.
-Amarie Gipson

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AS A GRADUATE STUDENT at Yale University in the mid-2010s, Tomashi Jackson had a striking realization: The essentialist language of Josef Albers's pioneering instructional text Interaction of Color (1963) closely mirrored the rhetoric of the segregation policies fought by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in civil-rights court cases.

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You know, writing Women's Work has had some surprising outcomes. One of the most unexpected things was the emergence of my textile art practice. My relationship with textiles isn't new, however; my mom can attest that I've been interested in fashion and sewing since I was a kid. I used to carry around a sketchbook and draw elaborate gowns all the time. I probably filled two or three books with ridiculous and impractical dresses.

Then in high school, I had a knitting phase. I dragged my yarn with me to class and would click-clack the needles during lessons, driving my teachers mad. I was only ever good at making straight lines, but that's okay because that coincided with my scarf phase. That's synergy.

During my senior year of high school, my mom bought me a sewing machine, but by that point, I was interested in other things and didn't put much effort into it. Also, using a sewing machine for the first time felt scary! It feels like you'll push the peddle too hard and get sucked up under the needle (this hasn't happened yet).

I didn't truly give sewing a try until after I had my son. I'd knitted him a blanket while I was pregnant (all straight lines, of course) and I had my eye on some tutorials for quilts, but I couldn't wrap my mind around the logistics of fitting the pieces together. Instead, I made him some cute little baby clothes. This was great for building my confidence in using the machine.

While writing Women's Work, I encountered stories of artists like Maria Martinez and Faith Ringgold, who learned their skills from women in their families. And there were others whose practices helped them connect with lost loved ones, such as Tschabalala Self and Otobong Nkanga, whose mothers both did textile work. Then women like Miriam Schapiro and Billie Zangewa made me think about domesticity and what it means to juggle multiple roles: wife, mother, artist.

I began to reflect on the women in my own family-particularly my grandmother and great-grandmother who made big, beautiful quilts-and I felt pulled to tap into this tradition within my family history. I wanted to connect to them, but I also wanted to connect to the women I was writing about in a tangible and experiential way. Through this process, I gained insight into the joys and frustrations that come with textile work. I sat at my dining table, sometimes while my son ate his dinner next to me, with heaps of fabric and thread strewn across our kitchen. I chased after elusive ideas and I stumbled upon happy discoveries. I cried when one of my quilts ripped in the wash, and I smiled to see my husband and son snuggle inside a finished blanket. It developed into personal exploration and was an unexpected gift that came from writing the book. It had also-somehow without me noticing-developed into an art practice.

In the spring, I was invited by Legacy Russell to exhibit my work in The New Bend, a show she curated for Hauser & Wirth in New York that would soon be traveling to LA and Somerset. The show features artists whose work is in dialogue with the history of the Gee's Bend quilters (they're also in my book). I was very surprised and honoured by this invitation, and I took that moment to reflect on what I was doing with my emerging textile practice.

For a while, I ruminated on ideas for what to contribute to the show, and I started (and abandoned) several pieces. In the end, I focused on the concept of unseen labour. So much work goes into the making of a quilt and I wanted to honour that work which sometimes goes undervalued, but I was also thinking about other forms of unseen labour; the people who do jobs that make our lives convenient, but that we don't always see or notice. For me, that concept can be embodied in the many seams that get tucked inside the layers of the quilt and are never seen again after it's complete. Those seams represent hours of cutting and sewing, and in my work Seeing (above), I put the seams on display by facing them towards the front of the work. There are no elaborate patterns or colours-just lines to focus the viewer's attention on that labour.

In another work, I am not a machine (above), I used linen and silk in the same colour to create a subtle textural contrast that hopefully draws the viewer's eye around the work. My aim was to encourage close examination. I got so frustrated while trying to make the squares line up in this piece because of the different materials. I realised that I was frustrated because I was chasing perfection when I'm only human. I kept repeating "I am not a machine" to reign myself in and eventually decided it was a fitting name for the work. I also like it because there's something in the pattern of the silk squares that reminds me of the punch cards used in some old machinery.

Now, The New Bend show opens on 27 October in LA, and I'm excited to share my work. This is a very new experience for me and I feel all of the emotions around the newness that one might expect. Aside from that, I'm pursuing concepts in my current work that I'm very excited about, including some ideas I've been chasing for a long time that I didn't go into in this text. I'm just figuring this thing out one day at a time.

Y'all be good.

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You know, writing Women's Work has had some surprising outcomes. One of the most unexpected things was the emergence of my textile art practice. My relationship with textiles isn't new, however; my mom can attest that I've been interested in fashion and sewing since I was a kid.

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Ferren Gipson is a firm believer in the value of an art-history degree. "People sometimes ask me what sort of jobs they can do if they study art history," reveals the American-born, British-based writer, educator and doctoral researcher at SOAS, University of London. "I'm happy to tell you that the opportunities are endless!

You could work on a film set giving advice about making scenes look historically accurate, or work with the police to track down sneaky art thieves. Art historians can travel the world to dig up ancient ruins or even pick up a paintbrush to carefully restore fading masterpieces."

Arts graduates could also research, curate and author the perfect imaginary art museum for children aged eight to 14, as Gipson has just done. Her new book, The Ultimate Art Museum, gathers the world's greatest works together, from ancient cave paintings right up to contemporary installations, and places them within easy reach - and understanding - of school children, between its two hardback covers.

The Ultimate Art Museum

With three wings, 18 galleries and 129 rooms, The Ultimate Art Museum has room for everything from an ancient Babylonian city entrance through to one of Yayoi Kusama's glittery Infinity Rooms. And this being a museum tour for kids, there's also plenty of interactive elements, such as puzzles and color-coded, foldout maps.

Indeed, The Ultimate Art Museum is quite a work in itself. So, how did Gipson begin to conjure up such a place? Here she describes her own early love of museums, her inspirations and her tips on talking to kids when standing in front of great artworks.

The Ultimate Art Museum

What were the formative museum-going experiences of your youth? Did you always enjoy visiting museums and galleries? I can remember going to museums of many different types as a kid-art, science, natural history, aeronautics, and all sorts. I think my family was keen to expose me to different things and stimulate a curiosity for learning. I can remember an amazing day spent in a science museum where I got to pretend that I was on a spaceship, and I can also remember being equally fascinated by a trip to The Mint Museum looking at portraits and artworks from around the world. I think those experiences helped me to explore and develop different interests, and I'm so glad for that.

Was there a single institution you had in mind when you created the Ultimate Art Museum? I didn't have a particular institution in mind when working on The Ultimate Art Museum. I looked at the layouts of several museums around the world-including The Met, The Louvre and others-alongside various art history curriculums and even my old notes from my BA studies. From there, I thought about how I could structure The Ultimate Art Museum in a way that shares art from different cultures across time.

The Ultimate Art Museum

Which museums does your son enjoy? And do you have any tips for gallery going parents? We like to take our son to museums that relate to what he's interested in at the time. When he was in a phase of being interested in buses, we went to the London Transport Museum. When he talked about being an astronaut when he grows up, we went to the Science Museum. He's quite young, and I think at his age, he sees museums as huge spaces where he can run around and play. Museums with interactive areas for the little ones are great when kids are small.

What was the first museum or gallery you visited when you arrived in London? What made an impression? The first museum I went to in London was Tate Modern and it was a magical experience. I'd recently finished my BA in art history, and it was incredible to find myself standing in front of works by so many of the artists I'd learned about. It felt like meeting a bunch of celebrities! I can remember one moment where I turned a corner and saw a long painting by Jackson Pollock. I was so amazed that I was getting to see it in person, and I sat on a bench in front of it for a long time.

I had a similar feeling when I visited the Louvre and saw The Raft of the Medusa. I'd just gone through the room with the Mona Lisa and there was a huge crowd waiting to see it up close. I decided to continue into the next room, rather than wait, and then I saw Géricault's massive painting hanging there. It is the most stunned and amazed I've ever been in front of any artwork and I'm happy I could I include it in The Ultimate Art Museum.

The Ultimate Art Museum

We all found different ways to replicate or replace the museum experience during the pandemic. How did you do it? I worked on The Ultimate Art Museum across most of the lockdown, so I was having an extended museum experience the whole time! One of the other interesting things that happened was the #MuseumFromHome hashtag, where people began to create short videos discussing art and objects on social media. I started to post my own videos and I really enjoyed that storytelling process. Here's a later video I did about the hidden meaning of eggs in some Dutch paintings.

You also contributed to another Phaidon book, Great Women Artists. Did your research for that book feed into this one in any way? I was very keen to display works by women throughout the galleries, and there are so many great artists represented. I included many well-known artists, but I hope readers will discover new favorites as well. There's Guan Daosheng in the Chinese painting gallery, Alma Thomas in the gallery on color field painting, Pipilotti Rist in the video art gallery, and so many more. I hope every reader can discover at least one artist they didn't know about.

Is there a simple thing any parent can say to a kid standing in front of an artwork that will get them to engage with it? I think it's good for people of any age to share their thoughts and opinions on art, and to feel encouraged that there are no wrong or bad opinions. There are so many ways to approach an artwork, from how it makes you feel to the symbolism within the piece, and beyond. When I look at an artwork with my son, I often ask simple questions like "what do you think?" He'll share what he thinks, ranging from identifying what he sees in a work to discussing what emotions he recognizes in the figures. Then, I like to follow up by asking him to elaborate on his thoughts. I think one of the most important things to do is to make sure people know their opinions are welcome and valid.

The Ultimate Art Museum

To find out more about The Ultimate Art Museum and perhaps even give your loved-ones a tour, go here. This imaginary art museum is an educational and inspiring experience without the constraints of space and time. Discover beautiful reproductions from pre-history to the present, arranged in easy-to-navigate, colour-coded wings, galleries, and rooms, each with an informative narrative guide. Marvel at its remarkable range of styles and mediums - from classic to contemporary, and from paintings and sculptures to photographs and textiles. You can order your copy from Phaidon here.

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Ferren Gipson describes how she created The Ultimate Art Museum

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Ferren Gipson is a firm believer in the value of an art-history degree. "People sometimes ask me what sort of jobs they can do if they study art history," reveals the American-born, British-based writer, educator and doctoral researcher at SOAS, University of London. "I'm happy to tell you that the opportunities are endless!

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The creative pursuits and colourful textiles of Ferren Gipson, author and art historian, at her home in Peckham

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The creative pursuits and colourful textiles of Ferren Gipson, author and art historian, at her home in Peckham

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The creative pursuits and colourful textiles of Ferren Gipson, author and art historian, at her home in Peckham | Journal | The Modern House

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The home of Ferren Gipson is not only a place where she lives, but one where she writes, sews and spins records with her husband, Tom Lloyd.

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Ferren is a researcher and advocate for art education. Her research areas include modern Chinese art history and topics exploring the crossover between pop culture and art. Her work can be found across mediums, including books, articles, interviews, and 68 episodes of the popular visual arts podcast Art Matters. Her first book is The Ultimate Art Museum (Phaidon), a museum-in-a-book for young readers. Her second book is Women's Work (Frances Lincoln), which celebrates the stories of modern and contemporary women artists working in textiles and ceramics.

Within her textile practice, she explores themes of labour, matrilineal connections, materiality, and colour.

Ferren has worked in the art and design sector since 2009, giving talks with wonderful brands and institutions, such as Tate and Esquire Magazine, and writing for the Financial Times and WePresent.

PhD History of Art and Archaeology
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in London, UK, Sept 2018 - Present.

MA History of Art and Archaeology (Merit)
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in London, UK, Sept 2009 - Dec 2010.

BA Art History, Theory and Criticism; Minor in Chinese Studies
Metropolitan State College of Denver in Denver, CO, US, Aug 2006 - May 2009.

Women's Work, Frances Lincoln, June 2022

"Body Vessel Clay - black female ceramicists across 70 years", article in the Financial Times, February 2022

The Ultimate Art Museum, Phaidon Press, September 2021

"The Show Must Go On", Royal Academy Summer Exhibition review, WePresent, WeTransfer.com, October 2020

Great Women Artists, contributing writer, Phaidon Press, September 2019
See more articles >>

The New Bend, Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, 27 Oct - 30 Dec 2022. Curated by Legacy Russell

Imagine: Celebrating Black Female Creativity, Francine Kelly Gallery, Oak Bluffs, MA, 7 Aug - 5 Sept 2022. Curated by Adrienne L. Childs

Panelist at Cheltenham Festivals (Oct 2021 and 2022)

Keynote speaker, ARLIS UK & Ireland Annual Conference (July 2021)

Panel Host, Esquire Townhouse event, Esquire Magazine (Oct 2018, Oct 2019, Oct 2020)

In conversation with Lubaina Himid, Art UK virtual event (Jul 2020)

Interviewed on paint-by-number history on BBC World Update (April 2019)

Speaker at the Association for Art History's Academic and Professional Development Day (Mar 2019)

Host of Art Chats, Tate Lates, Tate Modern (Sept 2018 and January 2019)

Available for speaking engagements, presenting, and writing commissions.

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Ferren Gipson - Art Historian, Writer and Broadcaster

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Ferren Gipson is a London-based art historian, writer and textile artist. She is an advocate for broadening the audience for art historical content, and topics in her work include explorations of the intersections between art and popular culture, highlighting the work of marginalised artists, and re

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Born in 1968 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Myrlande Constant is married and the mother of four children. She has been making flags since about 1990. Constant is the acknowleged leader of the new style of vodou flag artists, creating ornate and incredibly densely beaded flags, often much larger (some as large as six by seven feet!) than traditional flags. The flags are much more painterly than traditional flags, often showing side views ofm figures and even employing perspective. Though they depict the classic subjects of vodou flags, namely the lwas, they are often used and collected purely as art pieces. Constant learned the craft from her mother, who worked in a Port-au-Prince factory making beaded weding dresses. A number of women flag artists, including the late Amina Simeon, learned their craft at this wedding dress factory, which closed in 1988. (Biographical info adapted from the late Marilyn Houlberg's notes to show at Tap Tap Restaurant).

In April 2011 Myrlande Constant was featured in a major exhibit of Haitian Art at Brown University, entitled Reframing Haiti: Art, History and Performativity. As a guest artist Constant demonstrated her beading technique and engaged in a public discussiion with Wesleyan University anthropologist and poet Gina Athena Ulysse, who wrote an essay about Constant entitled Constant: Haiti's Fiercest Flag Bearer for the Huffington Post.

In 2018 Constant's drapo were featured in the groundbreaking Pòtoprens: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince exhibit at Pioneer works, in Brooklyn.
In December 2019 Constant's work was featured in the Faena Festival in Miami, which coincided with the annual Miami Basel art festival: A Haitian Artist's Glittering Vodou Flags Steal the Show at Miami's Faena Festival. There will be a solo exhibition devoted to her work at the Fowler Museum at UCLA in 2022.

Constant's biographical listing (by Katherine Marie Smith) in the Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography (Edited by Franklin W. Knight and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) follows:

Constant, Myrlande Charles (1968-), Haitian textile artist, was born on 18 June 1968 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to Jeanne Constant and Jean Alfred Sanon. Constant was raised by her mother, a seamstress who worked in a factory that made wedding dresses and beaded appliqué. From a young age, Constant helped her mother with small beaded piecework that she would bring home from work. When she was 14, she began working in the same factory with her mother. She quit this job six years later, shortly before the factory closed, over a wage dispute with management. Constant married Wilfred Charles. Together, they had five children.

After Constant left her job at the factory, an artist friend encouraged her to try painting as a vocation. She was inspired to try "painting with bead," as she describes her textile work. Constant began sketching Catholic saints on canvas and then beading the images. These images of saints are commonly recognized to also represent lwa (spirits) of the Afro-Haitian religion Vodou. For example, the first work that Constant sold was a portrait of Saint Patrick, who is recognized in Vodou as the spirit of snakes and ancestral wisdom.

Like many Haitians, Constant's mother was pluralistic in her faith, identifying as Catholic while also serving the lwa. While Constant developed familiarity with Vodou as she grew up, when she began her career as an artist, she sought moreformal instruction from her father, a well-known ougan (Vodou priest) in the region of Léogâne. Her father's instruction is reflected in her detailed depictions of rites, regalia, and myths associated with different lwa.

Constant's use of beads and the intricately rendered content of her works are innovations to the existing tradition of drapo Vodou (Vodou flags). Vodou flags stem from a longer history of martial banners in the Atlantic world. Formally, many traditional flags resemble Napoleonic standards used in colonial Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) (Polk, 1997). Vodou temples commonly have a pair of flags that are used in important ceremonies to greet the lwa. Typically the most extravagant part of a temple's regalia, flags may be embellished with sequins and embroidery. Since the mid-twentieth century, a handful of workshops in Port-au-Prince have also made flags as commodities for foreign tourist and art markets.

Flag artists typically supervise several apprentices who help execute their designs. Sometimes these apprentices go on to establish their own workshops and create their own artworks. When Constant opened her workshop, she employed former workers from the wedding dress factory. Some of her first employees have since gone on to become established artists working in the same technique. These artists include Roudy Azor, Amina Simeon, Mireille Delice, Evelyn Alcide, and Fils LaFleur (Josephson, 2007)

Vodou flags typically feature saints or a vèvè (a symbol representing a lwa) rendered in sequins. However, the technique of beading Constant learned in the factory and then introduced to the flag tradition allowed for greater possibilities of representation. She uses a technique called the "tanbou stitch" (drum stitch) because the fabric that the beads are sewn onto is stretched taut on a frame. Using beads, rather than sequins, allows for greater detail. Early in her career Constant realized that she could use this technique to make flags that conveyed narratives, elaborate rituals, and detailed homages to lwa. Her beaded works are much heavier and often larger than traditional sequined flags and are therefore not practical for use in ceremonies. Her works are still often referred to as drapo or flags, though some critics have questioned the appropriateness of these terms given their painterly quality and their distinctness from ceremonial forms (Polk, 2012).

As the scenes Constant depicted became more elaborate, she filled larger canvases. By the end of the 1990s, her works were much larger than traditional forms, at times exceeding 5 feet in length. Bitasyon (Familial Land), one of her largest works, is nearly 15 feet in length. It depicts a family's ancestral homestead as it brings together the living and deceased to give thanks to their ancestral spirits under the canopy of a sacred mapou (silk cotton tree).

Before Constant began her career as an artist, male artists had dominated the commercial flag-making field. She was the first female textile artist to open a workshop and the first to gain international recognition for her work. Constant has spoken publicly about the role of other women in encouraging her work. She acknowledges her mother as her primary artistic and spiritual influence. Most of her earliest collectors and patrons were women. She credits the photographer Maggie Steber, filmmaker Kathleen Keen, and anthropologist and art historian Marilyn Houlberg for supporting her early in her career. Although her work has gained recognition abroad, she has stated publicly that she believes her work has not received greater support in Haiti because she is a woman.

Since the early 1990s, Constant has worked closely with Gallerie Bourbon-Lally in Pétionville, Haiti. Her work has been exhibited in Brazil, France, Jamaica, England, and the United States. In 2012 Constant was commissioned by the UCLA Fowler Museum and the Greene Foundation to complete a piece titled Haiti madi 12 janvye 2010 (Haiti, Tuesday, 12January 2010). This marked a new direction in her work because it addressed religious themes through the depiction of ahistorical event. Haiti madi 12 janvye 2010 measures roughly 8 feet by 8 feet, and portrays Port-au-Prince and its cemetery immediately after the earthquake of 2010 (Polk, 2012).

Bibliography

Josephson, Nancy. Spirits in Sequins: Vodou Flags of Haiti. Atglen, Pa.: Schiffer, 2007.

Polk, Patrick A. Haitian Vodou Flags. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997

Polk, Patrick A. "Remember You Must Die! Gede Banners, Memento Mori, and the Fine Art of Facing Death." In In Extremis: Deathand Life in 21st Century Haitian Art , edited by Donald J. Cosentino, pp. 115-142. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2012.
Ulysse, Gina Athena. "Constant: Haiti's Fiercest Flag Bearer." Huffington Post , 14 April 2011. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gina-athena-ulysse/constant-haitis-fiercest-_b_848464.html.

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Born in 1968 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Myrlande Constant is married and the mother of four children. She has been making flags since about 1990. Constant is the acknowleged leader of the new style of vodou flag artists, creating ornate and incredibly densely beaded flags, often much larger (some as large as six by seven feet!)

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Vodou began in Haiti in the 16th century when West Africans were brought to the island as slaves. Practitioners of the religion made, and still make, fabric flags similar to Constant's to honor deities and hang in shrine rooms.

But Constant, who learned her skills from years at a wedding dress factory working alongside her mother, does things her own way. Her works are often twice the size of this work, a more typical Vodou flag size; and hers are immensely detailed, taking on a paint-like look. Another way she strikes out on her own is, that some say, that this is an art form typically dominated by men.

- Josey Bartlett

Constant was born in Port-au-Prince in Haiti where, as a teenager, she learned the art of beading while working with her mother in a Port-au-Prince factory making wedding dresses. Once she quit that job she moved on to be one of the most celebrated artists for making Vodou drapo. Constant has taken part in the revolution in the art of drapo-making over the last two decades. She has been making flags since the 1900s. Since the 1900s, there was an abrupt shift in drapo-making, which was primarily a male art form. There are several new designers who are women now, one of them being Myrlande Constant. Because of the impact that Constant has on other people, she influences art making in other individuals, in particular Marilyn Houlberg.

Constant bears witness to her nation's calamities. For example, after the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, the artwork Myrlande made represented the collectivistic society through the things that were going on at the time.

Her works are densely beaded flags (some as large as six by seven feet). Constant's flags are much larger than traditional flags. In 2011, Constant participated in a series of exhibitions, workshops, and lectures at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island where she conducted a three-day flag-making workshop.

Myrlande Constant had her first sale to Richard A Morse, who was the manager of the Oloffson Hotel in Port-au-Prince. Other subsequent sales of her outstanding Vodou flags were made through the connections of her husband, Charles, who convinced customers and visitors at the hotel to buy her work. Many of Constant's inspiration of her artwork came from her father who is a Vodou priest and Christian. She states that she has no one to thank but the spirits and God before the spirits. She additionally states that the mystical feelings and aspirations come from her thoughts. Everything she puts on a flag is there for a reason because the spirit keeps her working. Constant is also inspired by Milo Rigaud's landmark book called Veve. This book contains symbolic drawings of spirits made on Vodou temple floors. Constant uses that inspiration to remember her memories of Vodou ceremonies and knowledge of the spirits to create her own design in the flags.

The main process of the making of her flags starts with pencil drawings on white cloth. Second, she sews the sequins and beads to the cloth. Lastly, she incorporates the colors that associate with the spirits. Typically, most of her works are as large as bedspreads depicting various significant events in Vodou and Haitian history through using needle, thread, cloth, and tiny adornments.

Constant is particularly a well known Haitian and Vodou artist in many parts of the world. Specifically, her piece of the 2010 Haiti earthquake apocalypse was recognized as an immediate potential for becoming one of the 2011 Ghetto Biennale Exhibition in New York 's most extreme and powerful artistic visions.

Wikipedia

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Constant was born in Port-au-Prince in Haiti where, as a teenager, she learned the art of beading while working with her mother in a Port-au-Prince factory making wedding dresses. Once she quit that job she moved on to be one of the most celebrated artists for making Vodou drapo.[2] :p.183...

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Explore the exhibition

The artists' unique visual vernacular exists in tender dialogue with, and in homage to, the contributions of the Gee's Bend Alabama quilters - Black American women in collective cooperation and creative economic production - and their enduring legacy as a radical meeting place, a prompt, and as intergenerational inspiration. This exhibition acknowledges the work of Gee's Bend quilters such as Sarah Benning (b. 1933), Missouri Pettway (1902-1981), Lizzie Major (1922-2011), Sally Bennett Jones (1944-1988), Mary Lee Bendolph (b.1935), and so many more, as central to expanded histories of abstraction and modernism.

About Gee's Bend

The town of Boykin-also known as Gee's Bend-is an intimate African American community located at the arc of a bend of the Alabama River within Wilcox County, Alabama in the United States. The location was originally named for a landowner and slaveholder of the same surname who in 1816 settled in the area and built a cotton plantation. Many of the residents of the area are descendants of the enslaved people who worked on this plantation; they therefore carry shared family names, such as Bendolph, Pettway, and Young. The formation of the quilting tradition of Gee's Bend rises out of the 19th and 20th century and carries on to present day where a vibrant network of collective quilters continues to grow and apply their creative practice. In the 1940s, the land of Boykin was sold in plots by the United States government to local families still living in the Bend. In a complex twist, this made it possible for the Black and Native residents of the area-once subject to the extractive labor and economic practices of enslavement and sharecropping-to gain ownership in part over the same land their families had once forcibly worked within.

The quilts were originally produced for functional purposes and family use. Over time cooperatives such as The Freedom Quilting Bee (established in 1966 in Rehoboth, Alabama and remaining in operation until 2012) and the Gee's Bend Quilters Collective (established in 2003) were impactful in shaping an alternative economic model that allowed for the quilters to raise funds for their community. The Freedom Quilting Bee also played a key role in political consciousness-raising, active participants in the drives for voting rights and advocates within the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. Over time, a dynamic dialogue surrounding their work has expanded to international acclaim and enduring critical resonance.

Learn more about this history and support Gee's Bend quilters

The Heart Has Its Own Intelligence: Legacies of the Gee's Bend Quilters

A roundtable discussion on the occasion of the exhibition 'The New Bend' featured in Ursula Magazine
Image: Girl at Gee's Bend, 1937. Photo: Arthur Rothstein, courtesy Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project

While the account of Modern Art engages abstraction as a critical tool of experimentation, the narrative as it has been told to-date has not been inclusive of this group and the ways in which they continue to transform art history, visual culture, and cultural production across localities and generations.

Intersecting with the 20th anniversary of the groundbreaking exhibition 'The Quilts at Gee's Bend' first presented at The Whitney Museum of Art (2002- 2003), each of the artists featured in 'The New Bend' explores this legacy both in their technical approach and formal aesthetic. The abstract and expressive modes of cutting, stitching, splicing, and remixing articulated in this exhibition as queered performative and editorial acts also reframe an understanding of the digital, computational, memetic, and algorithmic. Audrey Bennett, University of Michigan Professor of Art and Design, coined the term 'heritage algorithms' in 2016 to denote the goal of 'not reducing culture to code, but expanding coding to embrace culture.'

In their co-authored essay 'On Cultural Cyborgs' (2020), Bennett and her collaborator Ron Eglash, Professor of Information, call to 'decolonize cybernetics' as a core component of ethnocomputing. What the quilters of Gee's Bend reveal via their transformative cooperative work is that they are both artists and technologists, contributing simultaneously to art history, as well as to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) practice. This duality exists in the work of each artist featured in this exhibition and many more beyond who continue to grow in this tradition. Thus, through their practice, the 13 artists on view in 'The New Bend' propose electrifying new directions, adding a promising new bend in this journey.

In Conversation: Legacy Russell and Salome Asega

In conjunction with the New York edition of 'The New Bend', Legacy Russell was joined in conversation by New Media artist and Director of New Inc, Salome Asega. Russell and Asega discuss how these works are in fact engaged with technology and act as dynamic objects for data capture while also being in direct dialogue with the tradition of the Gee's Bend dating back to the early 20th Century.

About the curator

Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen. Formerly she was the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell's academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Her written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, and a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award. Her first book is 'Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto' (2020). Her second book, 'BLACK MEME,' is forthcoming via Verso Books.
Courtesy Legacy Russell. Photo: Andreas Laszlo Konrath

Community Lab: Threads of Connection Workshops

We invite participants of all ages to join us for a hands-on, six-week series of community-building workshops, Community Lab: Threads of Connection, inspired by the exhibition, 'The New Bend' curated by Legacy Russell.

On View in Los Angeles

Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, ' The New Bend ' is on view until 30 Dec 2022.

The quilts were originally produced for functional purposes and family use. Over time cooperatives such as The Freedom Quilting Bee (established in 1966 in Rehoboth, Alabama and remaining in operation until 2012) and the Gee's Bend Quilters Collective (established in 2003) were impactful in shaping an alternative economic model that allowed for the quilters to raise funds for their community. The Freedom Quilting Bee also played a key role in political consciousness-raising, active participants in the drives for voting rights and advocates within the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. Over time, a dynamic dialogue surrounding their work has expanded to international acclaim and enduring critical resonance.

Learn more about this history and support Gee's Bend quilters

The Heart Has Its Own Intelligence: Legacies of the Gee's Bend Quilters

A roundtable discussion on the occasion of the exhibition 'The New Bend' featured in Ursula Magazine
Image: Girl at Gee's Bend, 1937. Photo: Arthur Rothstein, courtesy Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project

While the account of Modern Art engages abstraction as a critical tool of experimentation, the narrative as it has been told to-date has not been inclusive of this group and the ways in which they continue to transform art history, visual culture, and cultural production across localities and generations.

Intersecting with the 20th anniversary of the groundbreaking exhibition 'The Quilts at Gee's Bend' first presented at The Whitney Museum of Art (2002- 2003), each of the artists featured in 'The New Bend' explores this legacy both in their technical approach and formal aesthetic. The abstract and expressive modes of cutting, stitching, splicing, and remixing articulated in this exhibition as queered performative and editorial acts also reframe an understanding of the digital, computational, memetic, and algorithmic. Audrey Bennett, University of Michigan Professor of Art and Design, coined the term 'heritage algorithms' in 2016 to denote the goal of 'not reducing culture to code, but expanding coding to embrace culture.'

In their co-authored essay 'On Cultural Cyborgs' (2020), Bennett and her collaborator Ron Eglash, Professor of Information, call to 'decolonize cybernetics' as a core component of ethnocomputing. What the quilters of Gee's Bend reveal via their transformative cooperative work is that they are both artists and technologists, contributing simultaneously to art history, as well as to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) practice. This duality exists in the work of each artist featured in this exhibition and many more beyond who continue to grow in this tradition. Thus, through their practice, the 13 artists on view in 'The New Bend' propose electrifying new directions, adding a promising new bend in this journey.

In Conversation: Legacy Russell and Salome Asega

In conjunction with the New York edition of 'The New Bend', Legacy Russell was joined in conversation by New Media artist and Director of New Inc, Salome Asega. Russell and Asega discuss how these works are in fact engaged with technology and act as dynamic objects for data capture while also being in direct dialogue with the tradition of the Gee's Bend dating back to the early 20th Century.

About the curator

Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen. Formerly she was the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell's academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Her written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, and a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award. Her first book is 'Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto' (2020). Her second book, 'BLACK MEME,' is forthcoming via Verso Books.
Courtesy Legacy Russell. Photo: Andreas Laszlo Konrath

Community Lab: Threads of Connection Workshops

We invite participants of all ages to join us for a hands-on, six-week series of community-building workshops, Community Lab: Threads of Connection, inspired by the exhibition, 'The New Bend' curated by Legacy Russell.

On View in Los Angeles

Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, ' The New Bend ' is on view until 30 Dec 2022.

The Heart Has Its Own Intelligence: Legacies of the Gee's Bend Quilters

A roundtable discussion on the occasion of the exhibition 'The New Bend' featured in Ursula Magazine
Image: Girl at Gee's Bend, 1937. Photo: Arthur Rothstein, courtesy Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project

While the account of Modern Art engages abstraction as a critical tool of experimentation, the narrative as it has been told to-date has not been inclusive of this group and the ways in which they continue to transform art history, visual culture, and cultural production across localities and generations.

Intersecting with the 20th anniversary of the groundbreaking exhibition 'The Quilts at Gee's Bend' first presented at The Whitney Museum of Art (2002- 2003), each of the artists featured in 'The New Bend' explores this legacy both in their technical approach and formal aesthetic. The abstract and expressive modes of cutting, stitching, splicing, and remixing articulated in this exhibition as queered performative and editorial acts also reframe an understanding of the digital, computational, memetic, and algorithmic. Audrey Bennett, University of Michigan Professor of Art and Design, coined the term 'heritage algorithms' in 2016 to denote the goal of 'not reducing culture to code, but expanding coding to embrace culture.'

In their co-authored essay 'On Cultural Cyborgs' (2020), Bennett and her collaborator Ron Eglash, Professor of Information, call to 'decolonize cybernetics' as a core component of ethnocomputing. What the quilters of Gee's Bend reveal via their transformative cooperative work is that they are both artists and technologists, contributing simultaneously to art history, as well as to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) practice. This duality exists in the work of each artist featured in this exhibition and many more beyond who continue to grow in this tradition. Thus, through their practice, the 13 artists on view in 'The New Bend' propose electrifying new directions, adding a promising new bend in this journey.

In Conversation: Legacy Russell and Salome Asega

In conjunction with the New York edition of 'The New Bend', Legacy Russell was joined in conversation by New Media artist and Director of New Inc, Salome Asega. Russell and Asega discuss how these works are in fact engaged with technology and act as dynamic objects for data capture while also being in direct dialogue with the tradition of the Gee's Bend dating back to the early 20th Century.

About the curator

Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen. Formerly she was the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell's academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Her written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, and a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award. Her first book is 'Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto' (2020). Her second book, 'BLACK MEME,' is forthcoming via Verso Books.
Courtesy Legacy Russell. Photo: Andreas Laszlo Konrath

Community Lab: Threads of Connection Workshops

We invite participants of all ages to join us for a hands-on, six-week series of community-building workshops, Community Lab: Threads of Connection, inspired by the exhibition, 'The New Bend' curated by Legacy Russell.

On View in Los Angeles

Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, ' The New Bend ' is on view until 30 Dec 2022.

In Conversation: Legacy Russell and Salome Asega

In conjunction with the New York edition of 'The New Bend', Legacy Russell was joined in conversation by New Media artist and Director of New Inc, Salome Asega. Russell and Asega discuss how these works are in fact engaged with technology and act as dynamic objects for data capture while also being in direct dialogue with the tradition of the Gee's Bend dating back to the early 20th Century.

About the curator

Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen. Formerly she was the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell's academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Her written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, and a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award. Her first book is 'Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto' (2020). Her second book, 'BLACK MEME,' is forthcoming via Verso Books.
Courtesy Legacy Russell. Photo: Andreas Laszlo Konrath

Community Lab: Threads of Connection Workshops

We invite participants of all ages to join us for a hands-on, six-week series of community-building workshops, Community Lab: Threads of Connection, inspired by the exhibition, 'The New Bend' curated by Legacy Russell.

On View in Los Angeles

Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, ' The New Bend ' is on view until 30 Dec 2022.

About the curator

Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen. Formerly she was the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell's academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Her written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, and a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award. Her first book is 'Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto' (2020). Her second book, 'BLACK MEME,' is forthcoming via Verso Books.
Courtesy Legacy Russell. Photo: Andreas Laszlo Konrath

Community Lab: Threads of Connection Workshops

We invite participants of all ages to join us for a hands-on, six-week series of community-building workshops, Community Lab: Threads of Connection, inspired by the exhibition, 'The New Bend' curated by Legacy Russell.

On View in Los Angeles

Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, ' The New Bend ' is on view until 30 Dec 2022.

Community Lab: Threads of Connection Workshops

We invite participants of all ages to join us for a hands-on, six-week series of community-building workshops, Community Lab: Threads of Connection, inspired by the exhibition, 'The New Bend' curated by Legacy Russell.

On View in Los Angeles

Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, ' The New Bend ' is on view until 30 Dec 2022.

On View in Los Angeles

Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, ' The New Bend ' is on view until 30 Dec 2022.

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The artists' unique visual vernacular exists in tender dialogue with, and in homage to, the contributions of the Gee's Bend Alabama quilters - Black American women in collective cooperation and creative economic production - and their enduring legacy as a radical meeting place, a prompt, and as intergenerational inspiration.

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I never really cared for painting on canvas. The whole preparation process - building the frame, stretching and sizing the canvas, then sanding down the layers of gesso, incorporating the myriad unguents and driers into the paint and still getting an unsatisfactory result was a huge bore! I wanted to draw on a rigid surface and paint immediately! Frustrated, I switched to canvas boards but they only came in geometric shapes, so then I started using cardboard but it had built-in biodegrading chemicals, so I changed to plywood but it was much too heavy to hang and transport.
In 2001, I was asked to provide a teacher's workshop on Faith Ringgold who painted on canvas but instead of stretching her canvas over a wooden frame, framed her work in patched fabric and rolled it into a tube to transport it. Flashbulbs went off in my brain! Why not make the entire image out of fabric? It allows me to combine the sewing skills learnt at my mother's knee with the all the painterly skills of using line, color, value, perspective with the added fillip of physical and virtual texture that is inherent in the fabric. Making my images from fabric also eliminated all the weight, shape, size and transportation issues; the chemicals with which the fabric is preserved (formaldehyde) can be washed away but, with careful handling, the object will still last for hundreds of years. Issues on how to display this medium had already been solved by other textile artists.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I never really cared for painting on canvas. The whole preparation process - building the frame, stretching and sizing the canvas, then sanding down the layers of gesso, incorporating the myriad unguents and driers into the paint and still getting an unsatisfactory result was a huge bore!

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Dawn Williams Boyd Stitches Together a New American Story

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Dawn Williams Boyd Stitches Together a New American Story

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There aren't many photos of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, when white mobs razed the city's affluent Black Greenwood District. Though it's been described as one of the largest single instances of State-sanctioned violence against Black people in American history, the relatively few images that exist of its aftermath are black and white, and mostly bodiless. Limited by the era's technology and prejudice, they fail to capture the depth or scale of the tragedy.

For this reason, the artist Dawn Williams Boyd chose to make Massacre on Black Wall Street, one of a dozen paintings included in the "The Tip of the Iceberg," which is on display until December 17 at Fort Gansevoort in New York. Measuring nearly five-by-ten feet, the work presents the event as a narrative panorama: a group of white men cock and aim their guns as townspeople hide, surrender, or lie dead on the ground above a cache of human skeletons buried beneath them, while a plane decorated with American flag and Ku Klux Klan insignia flies overhead, dropping Molotov cocktails on the city's buildings. Unlike most paintings, however, Boyd's are made with a collage of fabrics, cut and stitched together with intricate detail. Looking closely at Massacre on Black Wall Street, you might fall down a rabbit hole, noticing its ingenious deployment of each fabric, like the delicate lace panels used for a storefront's windows or the black and brown batik bearing Ghanaian Adinkra symbols that serves as a tree's bark-and a subtle reference to Greenwood District's African roots.

It's striking, I tell her, to see something so horrible depicted so wonderfully, in a medium that inevitably conjures the comfort of quilts and all the womanliness that they imply. "Grandmotherly," offers Boyd, finishing my sentence. She hears comments like mine a lot. "I love the dichotomy of this beauty representing such an ugly thing," she says. "I want to tell you a story that you want to listen to."

Boyd was visiting New York from Atlanta, Georgia, where she lives with her husband, fellow artist Irvin Wheeler. It's also where she spent her childhood, which included enrollment as the first and only Black student at a Catholic girls's highschool located on a former plantation. The school shut down after her junior year, but not before her biology teacher was tasked with creating an arts curriculum. The first assignment? Create a papier-mâché bust of a classmate.

Photography by Tony Wang.

"That was my Eureka moment," says Boyd. "My portrait of Debbie Walsh was the only one in the room that actually looked like the person." When she left home to study fine art at Stephens College in Missouri, her mother, an educator and lecturer, was supportive, but encouraged her daughter to professionalize her artistic ambitions.

"I didn't do that," says Boyd, who gained representation with Fort Gansevoort in 2020. Instead, she took a position after college at the Atlanta Regional Commission, and, later, at United Airlines in Boulder, Colorado, where she worked as a reservationist for 29 years until her retirement in 2009. During that time, she raised a family and continued making art-sometimes on the job, where office management periodically assigned her to make posters for internal use. ("I had a whole little cottage industry going," she laughs-almost any task was better than answering phones.) She also co-founded an artist collective, ULOZI-the Swahili word for voodoo dark arts-that championed Black artists in the area and acted as a paid consultancy to surrounding institutions attempting to broaden their outreach to non-white audiences. "I was oftentimes token," says Boyd. "I used to say that I was a triple threat: I was female, I was Black, and I was talented."

It was through community involvement that Boyd came to adopt cloth as her primary medium, when, in 2001, she was asked to lead a workshop on the textile art of Faith Ringgold in honor of Black History Month. While preparing for the class, Boyd learned that Ringgold often demounted canvases from their frames before sewing quilt pieces onto their borders. The technique addressed two fundamental challenges that Boyd had continually confronted in her traditional painting practice: namely, that she has never had a knack for stretching canvas; and shipping frames and other rigid materials-including the plywood that she had, for a time, adopted as an alternative to canvas-was prohibitively expensive. Inspired by Ringgold's innovation, she took it further and scrapped canvas altogether, using fabric, thread, embroidery floss (and, occasionally, beads and other accents) for her designs. "I get to indulge myself," she says. "I can go into a store and see a gorgeous piece of fabric and find a use for it. I can liberate it from the bolt.

Boyd's work defies simple categorization. Though some might describe her paintings as quilts, shedoesn't refer to them as such. They offer little by way of a quilt's traditional function, for one thing; devoid of fill, the works aren't designed to keep you warm. Neither does Boyd feel quilting accurately describes her process, which remains rooted in the principles of classical painting in which she trained. The term quilt "gives you a specific connotation," says Boyd.

Photography by Olivia DiVecchia and courtesy of Fort Gansevoort.

It's worth considering why an artist might feelcompelled to distinguish her work from, say, the slippery category of "craft" to which a quilt might be assigned. In 2005, the critic Margo Jefferson suggested that debates over art versus craft felt increasingly passé. As evidence Jefferson cited "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," a large collection of quilts made by generations of Black women in an isolated area in Alabama of the same name; The Whitney showed the work in 2002-2003, and their unique abstractionism introduced many to a new way of seeing textile art. That seminal show inspires " The New Bend," which features the work of 13 contemporary artists, including Boyd, practicing within, and sometimes shattering our notions of the textile tradition, on view at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles this fall.

Boyd used to write down ideas for paintings in a small notebook that she carried with her, though after misplacing it-a "terribly devastating" loss-she now keeps a running list on her phone. At the beginning of each year, she reviews it and formulates a new series organized, usually, around a title. The result can be an entire story arc, as with "Ladies Night," a series of four cloth paintings begun in 2009 that depicts groups of women as they groom themselves and enjoy a night out at a fictional "Billie's Bar and Grill." Sometimes she works topically: "The Tip of the Iceberg" draws its themes from the many evils society tolerates but whose consequences are rapidly compounding beneath the surface of daily perception. Boyd made most of the works in the last year, with some exceptions, such as All Through the Night: America's Homeless, which uses panels of textured tan cotton to portray a cardboard box sheltering a family. (Scraps of an old log cabin pattern quilt gifted to her by a friend serve as the family's blanket and add a dash of material self-reference to the tableau.) Some, like In Fear For My Life, inspired by the murder of Tamir Rice, illustrate specific historical events. Others play more purely with abstraction, such as Ka Orda, which imagines the dichotomous god of Chaos and Order in L.E. Modesitt Jr.'s fantasy novel The Mage-Fire War as half Black woman and half white man, the latter pieced together with gender-bending soft pinks. Many showcase organza, Boyd's favorite fabric. Diaphanous and shimmering, in her hands it becomes the atmospheric cigar smoke in Smoke Filled Rooms, and smog in This Uninhabitable Earth.

The second time we spoke, in October, Boyd was back in Atlanta but preparing to visit New York again to discuss "Woe," another collection of hers on display at Sarah Lawrence College. After making art for decades with little recognition, she's enjoying her new, larger audience-"It's about time!" she says-though of course its attendant engagements take time away from her painting. Right now she's in the early stages of two small series, one called Fear, which reimagines iconic photos associated with race relations in America, and one called Families. (She's waiting for the dust to settle from the 2024 presidential election cycle before she delves back into overtly political commentary.) She wouldn't say much more about either project at the moment, except that she has "made a commitment" to use some of the fabric she's had stored away for a long time but resisted cutting. "You know, stop hoarding that fabric and then go ahead and use it for something.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Dawn Williams Boyd Stitches Together a New American Story

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There aren't many photos of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, when white mobs razed the city's affluent Black Greenwood District. Though it's been described as one of the largest single instances of State-sanctioned violence against Black people in American history, the relatively few images that exist of its aftermath are black and white, and mostly bodiless.

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The Right to (My) Life

2017
Mixed media
91.4 x 121.9 cm / 36 x 48 in

Dawn Williams Boyd

Dawn Williams Boyd's (b. 1952 in Neptune NJ; lives and works in Atlanta GA) self-described 'cloth paintings' masterfully reinterpret the traditional craft of quilt-making in a contemporary context. Working on a monumental scale, Boyd employs a collage-like technique, stitching together scraps of fabric into intricate compositions. Utilizing art historical references, current events, and religious tropes as narrative frameworks, her cloth paintings chronicle seminal moments in African American history and quotidian scenes of Black American life.

The solo exhibition, 'Dawn Williams Boyd: Woe,' was recently on view at the Dodd Galleries at the University of Georgia, Athens GA. In 2022 the exhibition will travel to the Everson Museum, Syracuse NY and Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville NY.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
2017 Mixed media 91.4 x 121.9 cm / 36 x 48 in Dawn Williams Boyd's (b. 1952 in Neptune NJ; lives and works in Atlanta GA) self-described 'cloth paintings' masterfully reinterpret the traditional craft of quilt-making in a contemporary context. Working on a monumental scale, Boyd employs a collage-like technique, stitching together scraps of fabric into intricate compositions.

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Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola - Hauser & Wirth

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
2021
Du Rag and acrylic on wooden panel
243.8 x 274.3 x 7.6 cm / 96 x 108 x 3 in

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2018
Rubber, sulfur, tree and paint residue, wood glue, latex paint, acrylic paint, strings and found cloth quilt
350.5 x 381 x 12.7 cm / 138 x 150 x 5 in

# data[].attributes.headline
‘THE NEW BEND’ BRINGS TOGETHER 12 CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS WORKING IN THE RACED, CLASSED, AND GENDERED TRADITIONS OF QUILTING AND TEXTILE PRACTICE

# data[].attributes.subject
‘THE NEW BEND’ BRINGS TOGETHER 12 CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS WORKING IN THE RACED, CLASSED, AND GENDERED TRADITIONS OF QUILTING AND TEXTILE PRACTICE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Dawn Williams Boyd The Right to (My) Life 2017 Mixed media 91.4 x 121.9 cm / 36 x 48 in © Dawn Williams Boyd Courtesy of Fort Gansevoort, New York Photo credit: Ron Witherspoon

Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, 'The New Bend' brings together 12 contemporary artists working in the raced, classed, and gendered traditions of quilting and textile practice - Anthony Akinbola, Eddie R. Aparicio, Dawn Williams Boyd, Diedrick Brackens, Tuesday Smillie, Tomashi Jackson, Genesis Jerez, Basil Kincaid, Eric N. Mack, Sojourner Truth Parsons, Qualeasha Wood, and Zadie Xa. Their unique visual vernacular exists in tender dialogue with, and in homage to, the contributions of the Gee's Bend Alabama quilters - Black American women in collective cooperation and creative economic production - and their enduring legacy as a radical meeting place, a prompt, and as intergenerational inspiration. This exhibition acknowledges the work of Gee's Bend quilters such as Sarah Benning (b. 1933), Missouri Pettway (1902-1981), Lizzie Major (1922-2011), Sally Bennett Jones (1944-1988), Mary Lee Bendolph (b.1935), and so many more, as central to expanded histories of abstraction and modernism.

Qualeasha Wood Ctrl+Alt+Del 2021 Cotton Jacquard weave, glass beads 213.4 x 157.5 x 1.3 cm / 84 x 62 x 1/2 in © Qualeasha Wood Courtesy the artist and Gallery Kendra Jayne Patrick Photo: Qualeasha Wood

While the account of Modern Art engages abstraction as a critical tool of experimentation, the narrative as it has been told to-date has not been inclusive of this group and the ways in which they continue to transform art history, visual culture, and cultural production across localities and generations. Intersecting with the 20th anniversary of the groundbreaking exhibition 'The Quilts at Gee's Bend' first presented at The Whitney Museum of Art (2002- 2003), each of the artists featured in 'The New Bend' explores this legacy both in their technical approach and formal aesthetic. The abstract and expressive modes of cutting, stitching, splicing, and remixing articulated in this exhibition as queered performative and editorial acts also reframe an understanding of the digital, computational, memetic, and algorithmic. Audrey Bennett, University of Michigan Professor of Art and Design, coined the term 'heritage algorithms' in 2016 to denote the goal of 'not reducing culture to code, but expanding coding to embrace culture.' In their co-authored essay 'On Cultural Cyborgs' (2020), Bennett and her collaborator Ron Eglash, Professor of Information, call to 'decolonize cybernetics' as a core component of ethnocomputing. What the quilters of Gee's Bend reveal via their transformative cooperative work is that they are both artists and technologists, contributing simultaneously to art history, as well as to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) practice. This duality exists in the work of each artist featured in this exhibition and many more beyond who continue to grow in this tradition. Thus, through their practice, the 12 artists on view in 'The New Bend' propose electrifying new directions, adding a promising new bend in this journey.

Eric N. Mack Forward walking boy on the edge where the sand meets the shore (from DES HOMMES ET DES DIEUX) 2018 Silk organza, cotton handkerchief and tulle 257 x 470 x 303 cm / 101 1/8 x 185 1/8 x 119 1/4 in © Eric N. Mack Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates

Tomashi Jackson Upright, Colored, and Free 2017 Mixed media on wood frame 190.5 x 137.2 x 25.4 cm / 75 x 54 x 10 inches © Tomashi Jackson Courtesy the artist and Tilton Gallery, New York.

About Gee's Bend
The New Bend 3rd Feb 2022 - 2nd Apr 2022 Hauser & Wirth New York 22nd Street hauserwirth.com

The town of Boykin-also known as Gee's Bend-is an intimate African American community located at the arc of a bend of the Alabama River within Wilcox County, Alabama in the United States. The location was originally named for a landowner and slaveholder of the same surname who in 1816 settled in the area and built a cotton plantation. Many of the residents of the area are descendants of the enslaved people who worked on this plantation; they therefore carry shared family names, such as Bendolph, Pettway, and Young. The formation of the quilting tradition of Gee's Bend rises out of the 19th and 20th century and carries on to present day where a vibrant network of collective quilters continues to grow and apply their creative practice. In the 1940s, the land of Boykin was sold in plots by the United States government to local families still living in the Bend. In a complex twist, this made it possible for the Black and Native residents of the area-once subject to the extractive labor and economic practices of enslavement and sharecropping-to gain ownership in part over the same land their families had once forcibly worked within.
Learn more about this history and support Gee's Bend quilters by visiting www.soulsgrowndeep.org.
The quilts were originally produced for functional purposes and family use. Over time cooperatives such as The Freedom Quilting Bee (established in 1966 in Rehoboth, Alabama and remaining in operation until 2012) and the Gee's Bend Quilters Collective (established in 2003) were impactful in shaping an alternative economic model that allowed for the quilters to raise funds for their community. The Freedom Quilting Bee also played a key role in political consciousness-raising, active participants in the drives for voting rights and advocates within the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. Over time, a dynamic dialogue surrounding their work has expanded to international acclaim and enduring critical resonance.

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Mark Westall
Mark Westall is the Founder and Editor of FAD magazine Founder and co-publisher of Art of Conversation and founder of the platform @worldoffad

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'The New Bend' brings together 12 contemporary artists working in the raced, classed, and gendered traditions of quilting and textile practice

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Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, 'The New Bend' brings together 12 contemporary artists working in the raced, classed, and gendered traditions of quilting and textile practice - Anthony Akinbola, Eddie R. Aparicio, Dawn Williams Boyd, Diedrick Brackens, Tuesday Smillie, Tomashi Jackson, Genesis Jerez, Basil Kincaid, Eric N.

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Eddie Aparicio is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, CA.

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Anthony Akinbola - Natural Beauty (SEAN KELLY, NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 8 - OCTOBER 22, 2022)

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Anthony Akinbola - Natural Beauty (SEAN KELLY, NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 8 - OCTOBER 22, 2022)

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Sean Kelly is delighted to announce Natural Beauty, a solo-exhibition of new work by Nigerian- American, Brooklyn-based artist Anthony Akinbola. This presentation, occupying the front and lower galleries, includes the artist's signature Camouflage paintings, single and multi-panel works that utilize the ubiquitous du-rag as their primary material. Universally available and possessed of significant cultural context, the du-rag represents for Akinbola a readymade object that engages the conceptual strategies of Marcel Duchamp and other significant artistic predecessors. The opening reception will take place on Wednesday, September 7, from 6-8 pm. The artist will be present.

Born in Columbia, Missouri, Anthony Akinbola, is a first-generation American raised by Nigerian parents in the United States and Nigeria. His layered, richly colored compositions celebrate and signify the distinct cultures that shape his identity. In the front gallery, an array of Camouflage paintings explore the du-rag as both a material for art-making and as commentary on larger issues of identity, respectability, and commodification of African American culture.

The subtle variations in color throughout the works were often subject to supply chain availability. Individual canvasses range from subtle variations on a single, subtle tone, to richly contrasting fields of color, evoking artists as varied as Morris Louis and Ad Reinhardt.

"Sammy Davis Jr. is a prime example of what could be achieved with a du rag and some grease. As I continued, I noticed there was also camouflage in the overall composition of the work, the material being lost in the overall form of the work. It felt like 'Camouflage' was an appropriate title." - Anthony Akinbola

In the lower gallery, Akinbola has installed a single, multi-panel work positioned in dialogue with a taxidermized goat, an action that both pays homage to Robert Rauschenberg's revolutionary Combine, Monogram, 1955-59-which featured a stuffed Angora goat, engulfed in a rubber tire, standing on a painting-and functions for the artist as a conceptual self-portrait.

"I was interested in the history of the word [fetish] itself and its relationship to contemporary culture. There is an interesting parallel that exists between the traditional connotation of the word and its more practical application in the west." - Anthony Akinbola

In Nigeria, goats hold a significant place in the culture and are commonly used for their hides, meat, and in religious festivals for ritual sacrifice. There is a ubiquitous fetish associated with goats and their totemic significance. Throughout his work, Akinbola unpacks the rituals and histories connecting Africa and America, addressing the power of fetishization around cultural objects.

"I like using the du rag because it has a strong presence. It's a loaded object full of potential. You could easily talk about everything from race relationships and respectability to mass production and labor." - Anthony Akinbola

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Sean Kelly is delighted to announce Natural Beauty, a solo-exhibition of new work by Nigerian- American, Brooklyn-based artist Anthony Akinbola. This presentation, occupying the front and lower galleries, includes the artist's signature Camouflage paintings, single and multi-panel works that utilize the ubiquitous du-rag as their primary material.

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Anthony “Bunmi” Akinbola Uses Art as Social Commentary

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Anthony “Bunmi” Akinbola Uses Art as Social Commentary

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Anthony "Bunmi" Akinbola would like to be known as an individual creator, and not for a specific body of work. This may well be the product of his artistic evolution. Akinbola's earliest memories of creating art occurred alongside his family; his parents owned a store in his native Columbia, Missouri, while also operating a local arts nonprofit. The child of Nigerian immigrants, he remembers clearly sitting in the back of his mother's store, rummaging through art supplies and monographs about Picasso-realizing that the shapes he knew so well could be reconfigured, expanded in order to create a visual commentary. In elementary school, he made 50 copies of his drawings and sold them around the neighborhood; the self-proclaimed MacGyver created foil figurines in his spare time, building toys from scratch using materials sourced from his garage. What he refers to as a "suburban kind of creation"-a response to boredom-has since transformed to an evolutionary, multidisciplinary career spanning media and themes. To this day, he infuses readymade and found objects into his work.

Anthony "Bunmi" Akinbola in front of his work Rosso Corsa, 2020. All photography courtesy of Anthony Akinbola and Cameron André.

The Brooklyn-based artist considers his artmaking referential. He clearly remembers an early collage piece he completed atop a large American flag entitled Target Practice (2015), on which he'd stitched portraits he had taken of Black friends, each one revealing a different facial expression, their bodies replaced with silhouetted shooting targets. Akinbola had interviewed each person and taken their photos just a few years after he himself was a victim of gun violence. He wanted to explore his own perspective on gun violence, and this, he believes, was a means of growing into his Black American identity. Growing up with a reinforced African identity, it took time for the artist to feel accepted as an American rather than a child of immigrants; from that point, he began to incorporate nuances of epistemic violence and critical race theory into his work, responding to his Blackness throughout, only later meandering into themes like commodification and color theory.

African sculptures in Akinbola's collection.

Material plays a vital role in Akinbola's artistry. He works with palm oil, shell casings, durags; every decision is significant and rooted in research. The artist, for instance, has spent the past four years exploring the use of palm oil beyond cooking, learning about the oil's production practices, which require extensive clearing and produce fire and smoke. In his work, the symbolism of palm oil touches on the calamity of the pandemic, a motif he said was "vague enough to be significant." As for the shell casings, these were items the artist came across in Belgium during a 2017-2019 residency at The Verbeke Foundation. He began to think of sound, the lingering ghosts of shell casings hitting their target, and so he crafted a device that would drop the casings off of probability, allowing them to drop creating sound in the space regardless of whether there was anyone in the space. "It's very similar to how these incidents happen outside in the actual streets, it's happening whether you are present for it or not," shared the artist. While conducting preliminary research, Akinbola examined the different types of bullets, their origin and the various sounds they made, the narrative changes that occurred over time playing into his work, largely in an effort to truly understand the material.

Mindfulness and intentionality are paramount. As Akinbola crafts his pieces, he strives to learn more about the world around him and allows his pieces to evolve naturally over time. Certain bodies of work, he admits, become different pieces entirely as they progress. For example his durag works-which initially dealt with accessibility and respectability, a response to the artist feeling othered while entering galleries-have morphed into two separate conversations around composition and color, the ready-made nature of mass production. Every work reflects a process of self-discovery, starting out quite literally before transitioning into a more theoretical take on color, texture, and the bending of fabric. The works have become more subversive as a result, a form of representational abstraction.

Each show is curated to the space in question. In Vienna, Akinbola's recent "Multilateral" exhibition at Galerie Krinzinger-where the artist was awarded a residency in 2020-is a response to living in Austria. The term multilateral itself is used often in international relations to describe the intersection of cultures, the joining of abstraction and representation among different bodies. The exhibition fuses work from across the artist's practice, including those from his renowned "CAMOUFLAGE" series, featuring the above-mentioned durags-visual statements of Black identity, global consumption, and cultural commodification. The exhibition also includes new works not yet presented to the public, leveraging palm oil and other materials to acknowledge the destruction brought about by COVID-19. Akinbola reiterates that he pulled elements from his experience to bring the show to life, acknowledging that there are times he simply cannot work with certain materials depending on the location. "I remember bringing durags to Belgium from America to work on some paintings, and I didn't end up even making the paintings. It just wasn't calling to be made at the time," he explains. The durags, he reiterates, began as a commentary on his experience living as a Black man in the United States, only later evolving into color theory while adapting the works in Vienna.

Akinbola appreciates that every work, and every series, features a unique starting point triggered by a specific location. He hopes that for every focus and for every material, work, or series, he can return after a decade, recontextualize his focus, and add new renewed depth to the meaning. "If it's a good work of art, you grow with it," the artist explains. And growth is certainly on Akinbola's radar. Lately, the artist showed his work at Hauser & Wirth in "The New Bend" exhibition, which featured 12 contemporary artists exploring the racial, class, and gender traditions of quilting and textile practice. He recently showed his work in Los Angeles, at an exhibition entitled "Black," held in February, curated to examine the emotional impact of the color black. Simultaneously, the multidisciplinary artist is writing a show with a friend as well as working on some audio-visual projects and creating and drafting programming for his family's art nonprofit. "My journey as an artist has a lot to do with how I am experiencing the world, my insecurities, my fears, my dreams, says Akinbola, it's a mindfulness for the banal, a regard for the everyday, a curiosity for the unknown and yet to be experienced."
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Anthony "Bunmi" Akinbola Uses Art as Social Commentary

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Anthony "Bunmi" Akinbola would like to be known as an individual creator, and not for a specific body of work. This may well be the product of his artistic evolution. Akinbola's earliest memories of creating art occurred alongside his family; his parents owned a store in his native Columbia, Missouri, while also operating a local arts nonprofit.

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Anthony Akinbola Explores Fetish, Camouflage, and Loaded Objects at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York

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Anthony Akinbola Explores Fetish, Camouflage, and Loaded Objects at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York

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Anthony Akinbola Explores Fetish, Camouflage, and Loaded Objects at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York

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Anthony Akinbola's exhibition, "Natural Beauty," opened this week at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, on view through October 22.

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Introduction to book: Stitching' and Pullin' a Gee's Bend Quilt

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Introduction to book: Stitching' and Pullin' a Gee's Bend Quilt

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Stitchin' and Pullin' a gee's bend quilt